


Spin

by metisket



Series: demon alchemist [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon - Manga, Gen, Vigilantism, both ears and the tail, crazy!ed, does not mean it's giving you bad advice, hawkeye has no time for your existential crisis, hughes is having way too much fun, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, just because it's a voice in your head, the press running amok, violence is the answer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:07:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 38,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metisket/pseuds/metisket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/596916">Theory and Practice</a>; final part of the Demon Alchemist series.</p>
<p>
  <i>Ed knows a hundred ways to kill a person organized into ten distinct degrees of painful, but only the most basic first aid. And if that doesn’t say it all.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First posted October 2010.

_“The crimes of children reproduce themselves, closing their victims in cages built of nightmares.” –Miri Yu_

 

There’s a story, a legend they tell in the east—it’s probably a Xingian story, really. You’d never know how big that desert is, the way stories wander back and forth across it. Stories about peacocks and palaces and princesses, stories about war and alchemy and automail. Stories about Xerxes.

This story, it’s about a guy who cuts himself shaving, and instead of blood, a couple maggots come out. And he freaks, he tries to dig them out with the razor, but the deeper he goes, the more there are. He cuts himself on his arm, and maggots come out there too, and pretty soon he’s lost it, hacking away all over, anything to get rid of them. In the end, he kills himself that way. Turns out there wasn’t anything in him but maggots.

If Ed finds it comforting to see his own blood, he tells himself that it doesn’t have anything to do with that story. It’s not like he’s worried he’s full of maggots, because humans don’t _have_ maggots for blood, obviously. It’s just some bullshit story to weird people out.

That’s what he tells himself. But every time somebody cuts him and he sees that good, clean red, he thinks, _thank god_ , he thinks, _not yet_.

He’s bleeding now, though he can’t remember how it happened. He ran into some guys in an alley, yeah? It’s creepy that that’s all he remembers, creepy that he blanks shit out now like a fucking drunk. Can you be a fighting junkie? Probably.

He hopes he didn’t kill anybody. Shit.

But however it happened, he’s bleeding all over the place, and he’s supposed to be meeting up with Hughes, and Hughes can’t handle crap like this. So he transmutes the cuts closed.

This is a trick he picked up from talking to Envy, and it’s getting to be a bad habit. He wishes he’d never figured out that he could fake medical alchemy by using his life as a source of energy; that’s definitely something people without much use for their lives shouldn’t know.

He uses it for every little injury, even though it feels like cheating. It _is_ cheating, and Al would be all kinds of pissed off if he knew.

But he doesn’t know, he’s dead. And Ed keeps doing it.

He’s tired, that’s all. He’s tired of fighting, he’s tired of screwing up, he’s tired of trying to find a reason to get out of bed (thanks for that, Hawkeye). He’s just really fucking tired, and at least when he’s dead, he can let himself rest.

And hey, it’ll be nice to be out of options. The minute he’s got options, he fucks up.

* * *

“Ed!”

Hughes gives him a big smile. It’s even a real smile by now, and Ed’s gotta say he’s proud. Hughes’s smiles for Ed used to have a kind of death’s head quality to them; didn’t seem like he’d ever get over that. But check it out, he has. Give the man a cookie.

“How are you on this lovely morning?” he goes on, swinging his arms, gleeful.

Hughes is being a freak. More of a freak, that is, than usual. “The hell is your problem?”

Hughes laughs and reaches out to grab Ed’s shoulder. “Have you seen the paper this morning?”

Ed hates, he _hates_ it when people touch him with no warning, and he hates it even more when people fucking _grab_ at him. It kicks off a panic attack; he feels caught, he feels trapped, he feels…

He’s gone feral. He knows he has, but knowing you’re crazy doesn’t make you any less crazy—he still can’t deal. He jerks away from Hughes, and Hughes looks sad, and fuck fuck _fuck_ , if it’s so hard to be around him, why don’t people just _leave?_

“ _No_ , I haven’t seen the fucking paper. _What?_ ”

Hughes rolls with it, which he’s gotten really good at doing. Because he had to. It’s just that hard to be around Ed.

“Observe!”

This paper Hughes is so proud of? Yeah, it kind of explains why the downtown is having a fucking riot right now. “Shit, Hughes. _You_ did this?”

“I did.” His grin’s turned all wild-man. Fuck, Mustang’s gonna go ballistic.

Ed knows from riots. He started one in Liore one time. Hughes is career military, so he really oughtta be familiar with the old _shoot ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out_ policy on civil disturbances.

Then again, Hughes gets so dazzled by intrigue sometimes that he misses the stuff that’s really fucking obvious. Like riots downtown.

“Okay. Here’s how it is,” Ed says, determined to be as obnoxious as possible if he really has to fuckin’ _explain_ this. “I pass a guy on the way here, he says, ‘There’s no such thing as homunculi.’ The lady next to him says, ‘You calling our Mark a liar?’ cuz, lookin’ back on it, apparently she knows the dick who wrote the article. Guy down the way from them says, ‘It’s the End Times!’ and his wife tells him to shut up, but the first guy thinks she’s telling _him_ to shut up, so he says what’s her problem, End Times guy says don’t you start in on my wife, and then some kid throws a rock cuz he’s an asshole. Everything goes straight to hell like a fucking bar fight cuz people are scared. It’s _chaos_ down there now.”

Hughes bounces on his heels like a little kid getting ice cream. “That’s perfect,” he says.

No joke, something really freaking _serious_ is wrong with Hughes. “Yeah, everybody loves a good riot. I’d say let’s go get hotdogs and watch, but shit, I think somebody burned the stand down.”

“Edward Elric,” Hughes says, still with the grin. “You of all people ought to appreciate the beauty of chaos in a military state. Things are now, as you say, out of control. Out of everyone’s control!”

Ed braces himself for mad laughter, but a few seconds go by and there isn’t any. Which is a relief, for what it’s worth. “So, like, if you can’t have control, nobody can?”

“I’m just leveling the playing field,” he explains, doing that earnest loony thing he does.

“Uh huh.” Actually, Ed’s pretty sure the homunculi are past the point of giving a shit about politics. They got what they wanted from Amestris already, right? Like, if Hughes had done this fifty years ago, that might’ve been useful. Now? He might as well be pelting Wrath with long-stemmed roses.

But whatever. As long as it makes Hughes happy, hell, Ed figures he can start as many freaking riots as he wants. Odds are everybody’s gonna be dead in a couple months anyway.

Well. One month, three weeks, and five days. Ed needs to learn to stop keeping track of this shit.

“Where d’you go from riots?” he asks, idly curious about just how crazy Hughes is.

“Well, I don’t know yet,” Hughes says, all chipper.

Answer: _really_ fucking crazy.

“Uh huh. Mustang know about this yet?”

“No.” Hughes bounces. Again. What’s with the bouncing? “Want to come with me and tell him?”

Hell no, Ed doesn’t want to be associated with any of this shit. “I gotta talk to somebody. Sorry, whatever.”

“Somebody?”

And this is the other Hughes, the one who’s not a goof. This Hughes, you can actually picture doing whatever he had to to survive in Ishbal. And scaring the bejeezus out of everybody while he did it.

Still too goddamn nosy for his own good, though. “Yeah, somebody,” Ed says. “See you, I guess. Have fun with Mustang.”

He walks off, and he can see, out of the corner of his eye, that Hughes is making little unconscious grabbing motions. Like he always does when Ed walks off and leaves him with no explanation. It’s maybe the reason Ed does it so often.

As for where he’s going, he saw the byline on that article. Turns out he knows the dick who wrote it, too. Reporters are kind of like vultures: apt to show up at a kill faster than the law. Sometimes they even run into Ed, and this one’s run into him a couple times.

Mark Rhodes, the giant moron, clearly needs a visit. Fast, before some homunculus kills him and puts him out of his misery.

* * *

Ed has to wait an annoyingly long time, but Rhodes does finally come stalking out of his office. Tall, thin guy. Big glasses. Looks like a giant stork.

Ed always has to fight the impulse to tackle him on sight. Guy like that? _Begging_ to be knocked over.

“You’re outta your fuckin’ tree,” Ed calls down to him.

Rhodes stops abruptly, blinks a few times, then tips his head back to look at Ed. “As opposed to the Demon Alchemist,” he says, “who seems to be in my tree, indeed. I wonder why.”

Ed likes the vantage point. What’s so weird about that? He jumps down, though, because he knows Rhodes, and he knows Rhodes’ll go on being an ass about it until he does.

“Why the fuck did you write that article?”

“The Demon Alchemist reads the newspaper?” Rhodes asks, whipping out his ever-present notepad and jotting something down on it.

Among Rhodes’s (many) annoying habits is a tendency to talk about people in the third person when they’re standing right fucking in front of him.

“I didn’t know you knew Hughes,” Ed says, ignoring him.

“I didn’t know the Demon Alchemist knew members of the military, either,” Rhodes says thoughtfully, making another note. “That’s very interesting. I wonder if the military supports the efforts of the Demon Alchemist?”

Rhodes’s annoying habits are _legion_. “Didn’t you _know_ that was gonna start a riot? Did you even care, or is this just another way you’re touched in the head, you fuckin’ psycho?”

“People in glass houses,” Rhodes murmurs, scribbling madly.

Poor choice of adage. People in glass houses can totally throw stones as long as they don’t give a shit about the house. Or getting cut. “What I’m saying is, you’re gonna get your idiot self killed by homunculi. Get the hell out while you still can, cuz this whole country’s goin’ down. Probably starting with you, if you keep on like this.”

Rhodes looks up from the notes and blinks his stupidly enormous eyes at Ed. “Can I quote you?”

“No, asshole. Fuck, I wish you’d pretend you don’t know I exist!”

“The people—”

“If you tell me the people have a right to know,” Ed says very clearly, “I will _break you_.”

Rhodes makes a note of that, and Ed can’t help it if he snarls like he’s rabid. He can’t. It’s not his fault, he was driven to it. Then Rhodes makes the serious fucking mistake of looking afraid, and Ed has to take off before he really does break the guy.

People are so freaking ungrateful. Ed was _trying to help_ , but maybe you can’t help people who are too stupid to come in outta the rain. Fuck it, the world is ending, none of this shit matters anyway. He might as well kill Rhodes himself. What difference would it make, if he’s not gonna leave? Split his stupid bird head right open, won’t matter in the long run, might make Ed feel better for a second.

_Oh, brother_ , he hears, an echo and a whisper. _Your temper is so embarrassing_.

Al’s voice.

Rhodes is more right than he knows—Ed doesn’t have a leg to stand on, talking about other people’s sanity. People in glass houses with voices in their heads, that’s some kind of extra special hypocrisy.

The voice has been there all along, ever since that day. It doesn’t have a lot to say—kind of like it was set to repeat a few extremely Al phrases over and over again—but what it does have to say, it’s been saying way more often lately.

Yeah. That’s not freaky at all.

It’s Hughes’s fucking fault, calling him _Ed_ all the time. Nobody’s called him Ed since he left Rizembool, and he liked that just fine. Liked being the Demon Alchemist, the Demon, D. Even Elric, cuz it’s funny how Mustang calls him that like he’s doing it to prove something.

But _Ed_. All that name does is bring back memories of what life had been like before Ed fucked it up beyond all recognition, and who needs that? Memories that cause more backchat from the inside of his own head can’t be good.

He wonders, sometimes, if this is some kind of goal of Hughes’s. You know, to point out everything he can’t have. Like, ‘Here’s my wife and my daughter and my perfect fucking life. Too bad you’re too worthless to even have a family.’

Shit, that’s not fair. Problem with Hughes is, he thinks he’s doing Ed a favor. The stupid bastard. Ed was right all along: hanging around with people is always pointless, and it’s usually painful, too.

Anyway. Whatever, so Rhodes was a wash, he’s probably doomed, it’s not Ed’s fault. Time to go check on his job security, because that actually is his problem.

* * *

Ed fishes a bloody tooth out of his pocket and tosses it on the bar. “Both ears and the tail,” he announces.

Chris Mustang, better known as Madame Christmas, picks up the tooth and considers it. “Don’t throw body parts on the counter,” she says after a second. “It’s unsanitary. David Finch, I presume?”

“Big Dave,” Ed agrees. “Slow fucker.” Probably the reason he was always tying people down. Had a thing for keeping fingers and teeth, the asshole. Ed tied him down and pulled all _his_ fuckin’ teeth out before killing him.

It’s not often that Ed goes into these things with _intent_ to kill, but when he does, he tries to be quick about it. It’s sick torturing them, and besides, it doesn’t prove anything. This means Ed’s usually more humane than the law, which goes in for firing squad. Pomp and circumstance and public violence, yeah? Very Amestris. So most of the time, Ed’s doing people a favor. But something about trophies really makes him lose it. He fuckin’ hates the ones who keep trophies.

Hence the tooth. Ed’s little joke.

Chris wipes tooth cooties off the counter, then fishes a manila envelope stuffed full of cash out of the register and pushes it across the bar. Shadiest paycheck ever.

Well, okay, that’s a lie. Ed’s paychecks actually tend to be shadier, but maybe hers stand out because she obviously enjoys the hell out of how bad it looks. Oh ho ho, is he hired muscle, a rent boy, just the kid who mows her lawn?

“Wow,” Ed says. “Check this out. Payment for services rendered. It’s like you’re my boss, it’s like I have a real job. I feel all grown up and shit.”

She gives him The Eyebrow. “Don’t worry, I know how very unencumbered you are. You’re Amestris’s most independent contractor.”

Ed knows she’s making fun of him because there’s no time when she _isn’t_ making fun of him. But sometimes it’s tough to figure out what exactly her problem of the moment is.

The door opens, distracting him, and he lets it drop. Not like it matters anyway.

The door is one of the new girls coming in with somebody. Ed doesn’t know her that well, but it seems like she’s honestly taken to the guy.

Ed knows a lot about sex and absolutely nothing about it, somehow at the same time. Maybe it’s that he’s channeled all his sex drive into rage, but as strong as he is on the theory…he’s got no interest in the practice. Of course, thanks to the power of first impressions, his back-brain’s decided that sex always ends with somebody getting a broken bottle shoved up an orifice. So probably this all comes back to his misspent childhood, yeah?

“Don’t sit there and brood,” says Chris. “You’re driving away custom.”

Ed thinks not. It’s a bar in the middle of the day; every last person in here is sitting around brooding. Unless they’re on their way upstairs—and those guys aren’t paying him any attention.

But he takes her point, which is: get the fuck out. “Right. Later.”

“I should have something for you next week.”

* * *

It’s a crap job, he knows that. He does know. But it’s like he told Mustang: you gotta play to your strengths. If you waste what you’re good at, then hell, you might as well’ve never been born. And Ed’s good at killing people, he’s a fucking _savant_. He’s so good at it, he does it even when he’s trying for the opposite.

Winry thinks he does this job because he feels, what, superior to criminals or something. That’s not it. That’s never it. Ed figures there are two basic flavors of criminal, and he’s not superior to either one. In fact, he pretty much falls into category two.

First, there are the assholes. Ed doesn’t know or care what their problem is; maybe they were just fuckin’ born evil. That kind, they’ve got purpose. They’re absolutely sure they’re in the right. It’s irritating as hell, not least cuz it’s been a long time since Ed was sure of anything. And the last time he _was_ sure, turned out he was dead fucking wrong. The assholes are the ones he tends to kill by accident in a fit of slavering rage. Nothing noble about it.

Then there are the other ones, the mad dogs. When you kill a mad dog, it’s not cuz you feel superior to the dog, it’s because it’s plain too dangerous to have around. You’re not executing it, you’re putting it down. Sometimes it’s even a sad thing. They didn’t set out to be evil. It’s just bad shit happened, and they tried to cope with it in a really stupid way. It’s weird how easy it is to turn yourself into a monster by accident. And if you ever realize what you’ve done, it’s too fuckin’ late by then. You’re past helping.

If Mustang had any sense, he would’ve put Ed down before now. But he doesn’t have any sense. Instead he has optimism, or what the fuck ever. He seems to think Ed is still good for something, that he’s trying to, whatever, fix the ills of society. Nice that somebody thinks so. He’s wrong, though. No matter what Ed does, crazy people are still gonna do crazy things, and desperate people are still gonna do desperate things. When Ed’s done with someone, all he can think is, “ _That_ guy won’t ever hurt anybody again.”

He knows exactly how pointless it really is. And sometimes it’s worse than pointless. Right now, see, he’d kind of like to talk to that bastard, Scar. Too bad, yeah? The only dead guy Ed’s ever managed to talk to is Al, and that doesn’t count.

Killing Scar, that was a sad thing. Even taking the Rockbells into account, it was sad. He regrets it. He doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t even fucking know anymore. He was definitely gonna let the guy live until he saw Winry, but that kicked his sense of mercy to the curb.

And now that it’s too damn late, he realizes it’d be nice to know what exactly Scar’s brother was aiming at with this east and west alchemy blending. The Xing girl’s useful, but she doesn’t know shit about Amestrian alchemy. Just like Ed doesn’t know shit about Xingian alchemy. They’re teaching each other as much as they can, but it’s hard to focus when the clock’s ticking down. As for actual examples of melded alchemy, all they’ve got to go on is an arm.

Great planning, Elric.

The girl’s being a real sport about it, at least. It’s not like it’s her country. If Amestris ate itself, Xing wouldn’t give a shit, you know, as a nation. Probably wouldn’t even much notice, not in the short term. And yet here she is, working as hard as he is—it’s like she’s forgotten what she came here for. He’s not gonna remind her, though.

* * *

The girl doesn’t show at the warehouse where they meet sometimes—fair enough, they don’t have a schedule or anything—so Ed sits there and beats his head against the alchemy by himself for a while. Gets nowhere, predictably. That end of the world thing? That _is_ gonna happen.

But here’s the twisted part: Ed’s still having fun.

It’s just, he hasn’t done hardcore alchemy for years, and somewhere in there, he forgot that he loves it. He does love it. It feels like his brain is stretching back into its favorite shape or something, like when you get back into working out after slacking for a week. Feels good.

On the one hand, his priorities are obviously fucked. On the other hand, he may as well have some fun, right? Like the man said, it’s the End Times. Time to party if ever there was one. Or, in Ed’s case, time to geek out on alchemy and do some amateur dentistry. Whatever floats your boat.

He keeps at the alchemy for like four hours before he’s too hungry to work anymore. He doesn’t want to crack into Chris’s money here on the first day he’s got it, not when he doesn’t take anything like as many jobs as he used to. So he’s gonna have to mooch food off somebody.

He picks the House of Woe because it’s fuckin’ hilarious over there, and besides, he likes to think it’s mostly their fault he’s broke.

He goes through downtown on the way, sees that the riot’s mostly petered out. Central has a bunch of pussies for rioters, is what—Liore kept at it for days. Here it’s only been a few hours, and already all that’s left are smashed windows and some burned out broken shit in empty streets, not a human in sight. Ghost town Central. Nighttime is prime riot time, too. No wonder the Father guy hangs out here, these people are lame.

The sun’s set by the time Ed gets to Mustang’s place. He usually waits ‘til dark to show up—best odds of finding them both in, and unlike the pussy rioters, he doesn’t mind being out at night. Plus it seems to bother Mustang more when he visits late. Like Ed’s some kind of boogeyman, scarier in the dark.

Huh. The boogeyman. Ed wonders if people tell their kids the Demon Alchemist is gonna get them if they’re bad. That would be awesome. He could ask Hughes about it—parent on hand, yeah?—but when he walks in the door, Hughes is On the Phone with Gracia. That’s an uninterruptable activity, and it’ll probably go on for hours.

Which leaves Mustang, who’s hunched over the kitchen table, totally hysterical. And he doesn’t fly too well with hypothetical questions at the best of times. Oh well. At least they still have sandwiches Ed can steal.

“Hey, Colonel. How’s the newspaper fallout treating you?”

“I hate you and I’ve always hated you,” Mustang mutters savagely to the newspapers strewn all over.

“Damn, that hurts,” Ed says, clapping a hand over his heart and trying not to grin. “And I thought we had something, Mustang. I thought we were buddies. Or at least, I dunno, partners in crime.”

Mustang snorts. “I believe you’re the criminal in the room.”

“Something something _riots_ ,” Ed says pleasantly.

“All perfectly legal,” Mustang insists, but he undercuts his own argument by rubbing his eyes so hard it’s like he’s trying to pop them out of their sockets. “What did you do today, Elric?”

“Nothing much.” Early morning fight, dodged a riot, chatted with Hughes, chatted with Rhodes, got paid. A little brooding, a little alchemy. Day in the life. “What brought that on? I got blood on my chin or something?”

See, the thing is, it’s just too easy. If Mustang’s gonna make that face every time Ed says something twisted, then he can’t seriously expect Ed to stop doing it.

“So!” Ed carries on, cheered up already. Free food, scaring Mustang. Life’s little pleasures. “What’re you gonna do now? Gonna save the world one riot at a time?”

“Actually, this will probably turn out well for us,” Mustang admits like it hurts him. “It does throw a wrench into the works. It’s just not… _elegant_.”

Hughes likes chaos, but Mustang’s a control freak like none other. This is one of the reasons there’s fucking tape down the middle of every room in the house.

“Roy spent all morning soothing upset people,” Hughes says from right freaking behind Ed, making him spin and start a lunge, then just about pull a goddamn muscle stopping himself when he realizes it’s only Hughes.

“My, aren’t we tense,” Hughes says with his eyebrows up, fake surprised. Hughes is a dick.

“Don’t sneak up behind me, you dumbfuck,” Ed snaps. Must’ve been right at the end of the Gracia call when Ed came in, meaning Hughes has been talking to her for the last hour plus, meaning he’s gonna be chipper ‘til Ed wants to kill him.

“Yes, yes. But about your saving the world question,” Hughes says, goofball supreme, “by the time this is over, Roy will be in a brilliant position, politically. On top of that, the homunculi are going to have a very hard time sneaking around from here on out. The riot was perfect! I tried to tell you this morning.”

Ed shakes his head. It’s un-freaking-believable, the way Hughes acts like this isn’t gonna end with dead bodies piled a foot deep all over the country. And Mustang’s no better. The two of them, they know it’s a house of cards, but they go and live in it anyway. Making all these plans for a future that won’t exist, the fuck is wrong with them? If you’ve got nothing, then you’ve got nothing to lose. Easier that way.

“A perfect fucking _riot_ ,” Ed snarls. “Maybe I don’t _want_ you assholes running the country. Oh wait, yeah, none of this shit matters anyway, cuz we’re the walking dead. Never mind. Do whatever the fuck you want.”

For some reason, he’s really pissed off. Really, weirdly—fuck, he’s _shaking_ with it, the hell? It’s just he can’t believe them. Can’t believe they’re wasting time setting this up like it matters, like it’s not all gonna be smashed and taken away in one month, three weeks, and five days and it’s _bullshit_ , is what it is.

On that thought, he punches the shit out of a chair so he won’t punch the shit out of Hughes or something. That’d be awkward.

Chair fucking breaks. He snarls at it, piece of crap, can’t even handle one goddamn punch.

“You need to do something about your temper, Elric,” Mustang sighs. He’s trying to joke, but he’s holding his jaw so tight it’s a wonder his teeth don’t break.

_Funny_ , Ed thinks. _My dead brother just said the same thing_.

But good job, Mustang. No wonder he’s a leader of men, yeah? There’s no better way to force Ed to get a grip than reminding him of Al. It’s like filling his guts with ice, calms him right down. Good job.

He claps and puts the piece of crap chair back together. Takes a breath. “Gosh, Colonel,” he says, trying to sound upbeat, probably sounding freaky instead. “I’ll try my best.”

“Stop that right now,” Mustang says, and whoa, it’s an order. Hah.

See? Mustang’s way more fun than normal people. Or maybe Ed just likes ‘em bossy, because that would explain, like. Everybody he hangs out with.

“Assume for a moment, Ed,” Hughes puts in before anybody attacks anybody else, “that we’re not all going to die. Just as a hypothetical thought! What would you suggest we do to prepare? We have the politics covered, but Roy’s not as up on alchemy as he used to be. Humor us with your expertise.”

What, now they think Ed’s just gonna lay down and give up? Hell no, he’s gonna fight. Of course you fight, that’s life. Doesn’t matter if it’s pointless, it’s what you _do_. The planning for afterward is what pisses him off.

“It can’t hurt to kill the homunculi,” Ed tells them. “That’s gotta rock the boat, yeah? Tough to fuck up the country if you’re dead.”

“Then you’ll have to take out their Father, too, and you don’t know where he is,” Mustang says with the pinched, queasy look he gets whenever he’s worried. Which is a lot, poor bastard.

“Yeah, but I know somebody who does,” Ed says. Mustang and Hughes put on these shocked faces that don’t make any fucking sense. Ed’s wondered this before, but, seriously, what is it they _think_ he does with his time? Because actually he spends most of it trying to find shit out, so surely he’s bound to, you know, find some shit out.

People make this murdering-for-justice thing out to be way more time-consuming than it is. Killing people only takes up like half an hour a week. The rest of the time? Nothing but boring-ass legwork.

But hey, if they want to think his life’s all mystery, drama, and intrigue, whatever. More power to them. It’s just depressing how they never learn.

“So I’ll go see my info guy tomorrow,” Ed says. “I like it, it’s like division of labor. All the monsters play together, all the normal humans play together. Cool.”

“You’re more human than you like to think, Ed,” Hughes tells him. Ed cracks up.

_Human_. He loves how people say that like it’s some kind of positive thing, like humans aren’t the slimiest creeps around. Even the homunculi tend to be basically predictable. Humans don’t even manage that.

And of all people, _Hughes_ doesn’t get how bad humans are. Now that’s hilarious.

“That’s me,” Ed says, still snickering. “One of the guys. I’ll, uh. _Report in_ , or whatever. Sometime. See ya.”

“Take care, Elric,” Mustang calls after him.

_Take care_ , shit. Man’s a dreamer.

* * *

The way Ed understands it, once upon a time a long time ago, some asshole decided he could make himself a country as a lab experiment. This asshole had clearly been around too long for his own good or anybody else’s, and was proposing to be around even longer.

So, next question: what’s the experiment? It’s not a Philosopher’s Stone, cuz asshole’s got those already. Something like that, though, only with nation-wide levels of bad shit instead of just building-wide. Maybe the scale’s bigger than one nation, too, what with it involving the moon.

Whatever, the theory’s all fascinating, sure. The fundamental problem, though, could be solved just by Ed killing this Father guy. Right? A lot of the world’s problems could be solved by killing the right asshole. And seeing as that’s what Ed’s good for…

Hah, like anything’s ever that easy. From what Ling says, this Father guy is no joke, a hundred times tougher than the homunculi. And Ed can’t even reliably take them down.

Still, Ling’s bound to have some kind of interesting news. He accidentally infiltrated the enemy camp, didn’t he? He’s a fuckin’ goldmine.

People are always looking at Ed like he’s a sad object, but that’s just because they haven’t seen Ling lately. Guy’s gone and made it so the thing he most wants and the thing he’s most afraid of are the same thing. The power to protect his country and the power to destroy it, all in one Ling-shaped package.

That’s no ordinary level of fuck-up. That takes a _pro_.

But that’s all Ling’s problem and none of Ed’s. For his part, Ed’s glad that Greed is around again, especially now he’s over his obedient lapdog kick. As homunculi go, Greed’s a real winner. And, yeah, predictable. Ed walks into Carl’s bar, and there he is, all right. Must be Tuesday.

“Which one are you?” Ed asks. It’s usually obvious, but not when they’re brooding. Creepily enough, they brood the exact same way.

“I’m _Greed_ ,” he snaps, indignant.

“Uh huh.” Why they both seem to think Ed should know, he can’t say. “Still haven’t learned to share, I guess.”

“If I ever so much as thought about sharing, this human would take the body back in a heartbeat. He’s not average, my host.” Greed’s all proud for some reason. “He never gives up.”

“Yeah, well. He’s only fifteen, still got a lot of energy in him.” Just like Ed’s only fifteen. Except Ed hasn’t got much energy.

Wait. Now he thinks about it, he’s turned sixteen, hasn’t he? Hell, time flies. So this makes him officially old enough to die for his country. Convenient, considering that’s what he’s about to do.

He eyes Greelin and wonders what the legal age limit is on dying for somebody else’s country.

“Speaking of him, lemme talk to him.”

“This body belongs to Greed,” Greed says.

“That body’s a fuckin’ timeshare, and I want. To talk. To _Ling_.”

Greed crosses his arms and puts on his total asshole expression. “The body is mine.”

Which is about the time Ed loses patience, so he grabs Greed by the ears and screams, “Lan Fan, Lan Fan, Lan Fan,” into his face for a while.

Funny thing, this shocks Greed into total lack of reaction. Ling, though? He punches Ed in the nose as soon as he gets the body back.

Hah. Ling Yao. Gotta love the guy.

“What happened to Lan Fan?” Ling demands.

“Huh? Nothing. Well, she’s worried about you, jackass, but otherwise she’s fine. She menaced me with a knife and everything.” It’d been pretty funny, actually.

“Can’t you come up with a better way to get my attention!?” Ling demands all outraged, clutching his ears.

“No, see, cuz when you flip your shit, that’s when you win. Which says something bad about you, huh?”

“What do you want?” Man, such a sour face.

“Just information, don’t be a dick. You’re an insider now, right? So if I want to kill a homunculus, where should I hang out?”

Ling huffs irritably and crosses his arms, but he has to know Ed’s right. “Well, Gluttony’s been lurking around the train sta—ngh!”

Personality flip, commence. That didn’t last long.

“That was a dirty fucking trick. _Both_ of you!”

“What’re you talkin’ about?” Ed asks, grinning. “Thought you were taking over the world or something. We’re doing you a favor, killing off the competition.”

“They can’t become my minions if they’re dead,” Greed explains, aggrieved.

“Yeah, well, they’re not _gonna_ become your minions if they’re alive, so…”

“Oh, but they will.”

“Oh, but they won’t. Hey, the father guy, you know where he is, right? Show me.”

“Our agreement was that you would be working for me. Do you remember that agreement? You don’t seem to remember that agreement.”

“Hey, I got my eyes on nothin’ but your best interests. You just sit back and leave it all to me. Greed for overlord!”

Greed sighs. “I don’t know why I ever thought it was a good idea to let you live.”

Hah. That’s what they all say.

* * *

“What,” says Ed, staring into the kitchen at…at…. Look, how are these assholes gonna handle a whole country when they can’t even handle one goddamn house? “The _fuck?_ ”

“It’s his turn to wash the dishes,” Mustang explains without the tiniest bit of shame. Which, okay. Fine. What that doesn’t explain is why the entire fucking room is drenched, along with Hughes and Mustang. Like, the bickering is funny, but trashing the house is just sad. You don’t trash a nice house. If you’re gonna trash your place, it oughtta be a shithole to start.

But fine. Whatever. Ed’s not gonna say a thing, not about how he’s gonna tell Gracia and Hawkeye about this, not even about how he and Al were better than this when they were _little kids_.

“It is not my turn. I washed the dishes yesterday,” Hughes is saying, folding his stupid, soggy arms and freaking _sulking_.

“Figure it out when I’m not here,” Ed snaps. “I heard where the father guy is. You wanna hear about that, or you wanna trash the kitchen a little more? I feel like the fucking grownup here, it’s bullshit.”

“Where is he?” Mustang. One minute fighting over the dishes like a brat kid, next minute looking like somebody you’d trust with your life. Sometimes the whiplash gives Ed a headache.

“Center of town. Center of Central. Cute, huh? Lab 3. Kind of explains all the weird shit Scar said he saw in there.”

Silence. Mustang and Hughes swap worried looks. Ed yawns. “So we gonna go kill this guy?”

“We might want to look into a little more strategy than that, Ed,” Hughes says. Hughes, the guy who strategizes himself into riots. And is dripping all over the floor.

“Whatever,” Ed says, and hops up onto the only dry counter space to wait out whatever meandering, waste-of-fucking-time conversation these guys feel like they need to have.

Hughes thinks they should go for the homunculi before the father guy. Hey, Ed’s down for that. But oh no, Mustang wants to go talk to some general. The fuck does he want to do that for? Neither Hughes nor Ed is particularly clear. But he just keeps talking: she’s not as vicious as she looks this, maybe I can persuade her that, and pretty soon Hughes is nodding along.

This kind of shit always happens around Mustang. Sometimes people get out of his sphere of influence and snap out of it, but more often they never recover, just wander along, dazed and obedient, totally convinced Mustang’s idea is awesome. And sometimes Mustang’s ideas are awesome, but other times, see, they’re crap. Whiplash again, and no one seems to see this except for Ed. Even Hughes, who should freaking _know better_ , gets pulled along.

They decide Mustang’ll go talk to the general, and Hughes’ll talk to that guy…whatever…Hawkeye’s granddad (and how weird is _that?_ ). They nod at each other, pretending to be grim. Grim, hah. Yeah right. They love this scheming shit.

Obviously, this means Hughes is getting ditched with the dishes. Ed hopes Mustang knows he’s gonna suffer for that later.

“My perfect daughter,” Hughes murmurs out of nowhere, staring at a dripping dish with freaky, tranced-out eyes, “is the world’s best dish-wiper! Did I ever mention that?”

Mustang scurries out the door before he gets a dish chucked at his head. Ed grins at Hughes, who bows a little, then he follows Mustang out. Probably a good idea to make sure this random general doesn’t kill him. How annoying would that be? Hawkeye would kick Ed’s ass all the way to East, for one thing.

It takes Mustang almost the whole walk to the car to figure out that Ed’s tagging along.

“What are you doing, Elric?” he asks. You’d think it’d be obvious to a guy as smart as Mustang pretends to be.

“Just coming to watch this crash and burn. Why?”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Hey, actually, I gotta a question. You in the mood for questions?”

“Is there any way I can persuade you not to come along? By pointing out that you’re not military? By pointing out that she’ll be more suspicious if you’re there? Violence, bribes, any method at all?”

“Nope.”

Mustang sighs all woeful. His life is so hard. “Ask your question.”

“You and Ling, you’re both doing stupid fucking things to take over your countries. Ling was born to it, so I kinda get him. What’s your deal? Why do you have to be the one to fix all the shit?”

Mustang’s quiet for a long time. Quiet and grim, for real this time. Finally he says, “It’s my duty to protect as many people as I can. It’s the only thing that will come close to making up for what I’ve done.”

Ed smiles. Like Hughes said, then. Mustang thinks he’s so _bad_ ; it’s hilarious. It’s even sort of sweet. You’d think—the guy calls himself an adult, right?—you’d think he’d have seen what bad is, by now.

But maybe not. It’s not like most people go looking for evil in quite the determined way Ed does. Then again, Mustang served with freaking _Kimbley_. He should know he isn’t in that league.

Yeah. It’s cute how he doesn’t.

“And you think that’s funny,” Mustang murmurs. He doesn’t know whether to be pissed off or just confused, and that’s pretty hilarious, too.

“I think your face is funny, Colonel,” Ed says. “I got no comment on your megalomania. Because we _had_ this talk already. So yeah, question over. Can we go kill these guys now, or we gonna keep on with the heart to heart?”

“We’re not killing them, Elric, weren’t you listening?” Uh, obviously not, Mustang. “We’re trying to convince them to cooperate with us.”

“Uh huh. So like, if they won’t cooperate, we can kill them then?”

“ _Elric_.”

Too. Easy.

* * *

They run into the general right outside the base. Mustang says that’s lucky, cuz no way was he letting Ed on base. “I absolutely do not want your presence being a matter of military record,” he says. Apparently the gate guards can ID everybody if the mood strikes them. Ed’s not a fan of that idea, either. For one thing, he never carries any ID. He bets that wouldn’t make him popular with the guards.

The general turns out to be General Armstrong, the crying Armstrong’s older sister. You’d never know it, though. This lady? For sure if you ever saw her cry, she’d kill you.

She gives Ed one long look when he and Mustang show up, then nods a little, like maybe he isn’t totally useless. That done, she drops him from her attention completely (Ed can’t actually remember the last time somebody did that; it’s a weird feeling) in favor of fighting with Mustang. And whoa. Stand aside for the pros. They’re going a mile a minute: Mustang’s being a skeezeball, Armstrong’s calling him worthless, and they’re pretending not to plot the overthrow of their government with everything they got.

Bad as Hughes, both of ‘em.

It’s fun watching them do the hissing alley cat thing for a while, but it dulls after ten minutes or so, and Ed’s gotta look for his entertainment elsewhere. Lucky him, he doesn’t have to look far.

Armstrong’s number two is some guy called Miles. He’s Ishbalan, he’s in the Amestrian military, he is clearly one twisted man. Ed likes him already.

Unlike that worthless bastard Scar, Miles reminds Ed of the Ishbalans he knew in Xerxes. Tough and crazy and totally unbeatable, just like the desert. Like they’d lived there so long, they’d absorbed part of the essence of it right into them.

Ed spends a lot of time in the desert, when he has time. In winter, especially. As soon as he could move with the automail back when, he ran to the desert for reasons that were never totally clear to him. Maybe he’d had plans of death by heat stroke. Fuck knows. That wasn’t the most mentally stable time in his life, what with the death and the pain and the voice in his head.

But maybe he was looking for the ruins, for the city where everybody died in a night. Maybe he was looking for proof that, once upon a time, somebody had fucked up even worse than Edward Elric. And if that’s what he was looking for, then yeah, he found it. He stayed out there for almost a year, only leaving for library runs to try to work out how he’d managed to kill Al.

It’s a clean kind of insanity you get in the desert, always more dangerous to the people around you than it is to you. The light and heat, it makes people angry. Hot blooded, hah. Sun and dirt and scrubby plants and poisonous animals, and there’s no question that life’s a bitch and a struggle. The desert can’t be bothered to tell lies; everybody there knows the score. Fight or die, that’s all there is. And for Ed, there was always the automail, always the burning. Like punishment built right in so he didn’t have to worry about it.

(Didn’t have to worry about it, that is, until just recently when Winry saw the burn scars. God _damn_ , the _shrieking_.)

When you go crazy in a city, it’s different. It turns you in on yourself first, out on everybody else later. Ed read somewhere that if you put too many rats in a cage, they lose it and start killing each other, even if they have plenty to eat. That may be why he cracks so hard in cities. Too many rats.

City crazy gets worse in the winter. Ed wonders what the hell Miles was thinking, moving up north. Or is it okay because he takes the desert with him wherever he goes? Ed thinks he’d like that; thinks it would’ve been cool to grow up in the desert himself. Although not to grow up Ishbalan, because, you know, fucking genocide.

“You’re staring, boy,” Miles says, soft and uninflected. Not making eye contact, because you don’t, in the desert. Not unless you want to start something.

Ed smiles, remembering. The first time he’d run out there, he’d _always_ wanted to start something. Nice how they’d made it so easy.

“You remind me of somebody,” he says, and he says it in Ishbalan, not because he needs to, not because it even makes sense for him to be talking like a priest, but just to fuck with the guy. See if he can startle up a facial expression.

“I see,” Miles answers in Amestrian. And that’s a no on expressions. Ed grins.

Miles reminds him of Kael, actually. Kael had been justifiably not too shot with having a nutball little Amestrian kid show up and start picking fights with anybody who held still long enough. But Kael’d gotten used to him. Maybe Miles would too.

Kael’s the one who gave Ed the whole vigilante idea, actually. Mistress Shan is, practically speaking, the Law of Xerxes, and Kael’s the tool she uses to enforce it. She aims him at people who have it coming, and he wipes them out. Ed liked the idea, although it was annoying to have to do all the legwork himself. At least Chris does that shit now.

Mistress Shan and Kael would beat Ed to death if they knew what he’d done with their model of justice. They’d take it in turn.

“I understand you killed one of my fellow Ishbalans,” Miles says. No judgment in it, just a statement.

Damn, this guy’s grapevine _rocks_.

“Yeah, he was a dick,” Ed agrees. “I’m kinda regretting it now, though. Turns out I coulda used him. But time only goes one way.” That’s a Mistress Shan quote. “Tough shit, I guess.”

Miles frowns, like he’s got no clue _what_ to make of Ed anymore. Ed gets that a lot.

“Elric,” Mustang calls, walking away, obviously expecting Ed’ll follow like he’s on a leash. Conversation over then? Fucker could’ve just said so. Course, they are in front of a military base. Should Ed act, uh, military?

He turns and gives the general Armstrong and Miles a half-assed salute for the hell of it, then trots after Mustang. Or like, trots up right behind him and punches him in the kidney for acting all lord and master, but close enough.

He can hear Miles cracking up back there. The guy’s got a sense of humor, hey.

Mustang makes a pretty entertaining _argh_ kind of noise, but then he bitches Ed out for ages. Still worth it for the _argh_.

Mustang shuts up abruptly when he figures out that this blond guy who’s walking toward them is actually walking _at_ them. Blond guy is of the Asshole with a Clipboard variety. Watching Mustang salute him basically makes Ed want to kill everyone.

“Colonel Mustang,” the asshole says with his uptight face all pinched together. “Unusual to see you here on a Saturday. And with a…” He eyes Ed and tries to come up with a description. Ed stares back and daydreams about transmuting the ground under him into a big dragon mouth made of rock. The rock dragon would swallow the guy, Ed would transmute the ground normal, they wouldn’t even have to worry about what to do with the body. Neat. “Minor,” the guy decides.

“The son of a friend,” Mustang says, which distracts Ed from rock dragons. Hah, somebody’s scarred little teenage thug, Mustang? Yeah, sure. Though, come to think of it, Ed can totally picture people dumping their problem kids on Mustang. _Straighten him up, Colonel. Make a man of him!_

“Hm,” says Asshole Clipboard. “Irregular.”

_Just don’t clap_ , Ed tells himself. _You can think all the bad arrays you want. You can picture ripping the fucker apart in many and creative ways. But don’t clap_.

_Don’t clap, don’t clap, don’t clap_.

If Mustang knew how often Ed has to have this little chat with himself, he wouldn’t be so goddamn trusting.

Mustang fobs the guy off with things to do, Saturday, you know, whatever. Calls him sir. Ed reminds himself a few more times not to clap.

They slither away in the end without having said much of anything, Mustang at his weasely best, and manage to crawl back into the car. Mustang looks like he’s heading to his own execution.

“What’s your problem?” Ed asks, because seriously what the fuck? Ed’s the one who had to watch Mustang act like he respected a total douche, he is the injured party here, Mustang needs to get a grip.

“We could be in trouble,” Mustang says, starting the car.

“That’s different from normal how?”

“That was the fuhrer’s personal secretary,” Mustang says, and peels out on a goddamn city street.

Ed thinks, _Should’ve clapped_.

* * *

That whole stupid thing just goes to show Ed was right, you should play to your strengths. If he can’t handle watching the weaseling, he needs to bow out for Mustang, Hughes, the general Armstrong, whoever. People who _can_ handle it. With that in mind, he spends the next few days leaving the politics alone and thinking about alchemy instead. For all the fuckin’ good it does.

“I told you, you need to feel the dragon’s pulse,” the Xing girl says. Her face, meanwhile, says she’s starting to think Ed’s actually stupid.

“I don’t know what the _fuck that means_ ,” Ed points out for like the fiftieth time. “What’s it meant to feel like? What’re you feeling it with? Should I stare really hard at the dirt and wait for something to happen?”

Now even the cat thing’s staring at him like he’s stupid.

“You are dead inside just like your country,” the girl tells him. “Close your eyes and _feel it_.”

So yeah. That’s a wash.

He does figure out one thing from talking to the girl, though. He figures out why he’s got a voice in his head. Useless information, maybe, but he can’t deny it’s been bugging him.

They’ve been talking a lot about the Gate, souls, spirits, shit like that. And it gets him thinking that probably he and Al got mixed up in Gate, what with the whole blood mixing thing. Probably they ended up sort of tangled, like their spirits crossed or whatever.

And then Al died, and he went ripping through Ed on his way out.

So that’s the working theory on what the voice is. An afterimage. An echo. No way to prove anything, obviously. It could be an echo, but then again, it could be that Ed’s fucking nuts. He can’t decide which option’s worse.

* * *

Ed leaves Mustang and crew alone for a little while, and everything goes straight to hell. Apparently Asshole Clipboard was exactly as much of an asshole as he looked like he was, and seriously, Ed _should have clapped_.

“Hang on, you’re in _hiding?_ ”

“Technically,” Hughes says proudly, “we’re AWOL.”

He’s always looking happy about things that are totally fucked up and it makes Ed want to put a fist through the wall. “Get that smirk off your face before I take it off for you. Why’re you hiding?”

“We were all reassigned to strange places. Fuhrer Homunculus made a menacing speech to Roy. We didn’t have time for all that. Hence, AWOL!”

“If you’re in hiding, why were you so fuckin’ easy to find?”

“I was waiting for you.”

Ed’s mouth drops open, because what the _fuck_. “There’re less boring ways to kill yourself than to sit here waiting for a military execution, you giant freak.” And that’s just one problem among an infinite array of problems, each more screamingly idiotic than the one before.

“We didn’t want you to think we’d abandoned you,” Hughes says. Smiling. Fucking _smiling_. Sitting at the kitchen table like this is any other day, _smiling_.

Ed kicks over the chair next to Hughes (it’s the one he broke before, he’s kinda hard on that chair). That done, he goes to the kitchen cabinet, hauls out all the plates (they really gotta be so goddamn high?), and dumps them on the floor with a satisfying crash. He heads for the back door dragging another chair behind him by the legs, knocking shit over with it. It looks a little like he dragged a body through the house. He slams the chair into the wall next to the door a few times, then chucks it randomly into the living room, where it makes some kind of bad smashing noise. He kicks in the glass on the front of Mustang’s big, stupid clock for good measure, then claps and blows up the doorknob on the back door. He thinks about smearing blood somewhere, but decides it’d be overkill.

Not perfect. He’d need to set some shit on fire if he wanted to do this right. But they might’ve broken Mustang’s fingers, yeah? And Ed doesn’t want to accidentally burn the place down, that’d be fuckin’ ridiculous.

“Let’s get outta here before somebody comes to see what the hell that was about,” he calls to Hughes, who’s still sitting at the table like a moron.

“Ah.” Hughes hops up, obedient. Which is good, cuz Ed didn’t want to have to knock him out and drag him. “And…what _was_ that about? Exactly?”

“Making this confusing instead of just straight stupid,” Ed explains as they head out the back. Freaking Hughes. He looks so smart, he acts so _dumb_. “Now you might be AWOL or you might be abducted, nobody can tell. We’re doing Hawkeye’s place next. I’m guessing you took Hawkeye down with you.”

“We didn’t take her _down_ —”

“Shut up. Where’s she live?”

“I suspect the Lieutenant isn’t going to approve of your trashing her house, Ed.”

“No shit. That’s why we’re gonna ask forgiveness and not permission.”

“We can’t ask her forgiveness once she shoots us to death.”

Ed shrugs. “Worse ways to go,” he mutters.

Hughes sighs, pushes up his glasses, and rubs the bridge of his nose. Like he’s the one who’s got a headache when, actually, he _is_ a headache. “Six blocks west,” he says. “And I hope some god or other has mercy on us.”

Ed’s not betting on it.

Mustang and crew are huddled away in a house downtown that belongs to some absent friend of Hughes’s. Ed wonders if this friend knows they’re using his house. Well, whatever, it’s not Ed’s problem. He’s got a bigger problem, namely surviving this chat with Hawkeye.

“You broke _what?_ ” she demands. Her hand’s going for her holster, and, haha, Ed would feel a lot better if he thought she knew that.

“It was practically the only thing unpacked! The fuck is wrong with you anyway, what was with the boxes? Were you _planning_ to go on the run?”

“I was really fond of that mirror, Edward,” she says.

“What th—it was just a mirror! It didn’t even have a frame! The _hell?_ ”

Oh, shit, now her trigger finger’s twitching. “You’ll buy me a new mirror. And it will be exactly the same as the old one, Edward.”

Hughes has the biggest, looniest grin Ed’s ever seen on his face. It’s not right that he’s dodging this bullet completely. He stood there and let Ed break the apparently precious fucking mirror, didn’t he?

“Fine. Same damn mirror. Or, hey, I’m an alchemist. Maybe I’ll fix the old one, how ‘bout that?”

“Exactly the same,” Hawkeye says again. She’s crossed her arms tight together now, like she’s trying not to shoot him. Sweet of her. Ed crosses his arms, too, and scowls, so they’re mirror images of each other. She is so weird. He told her he dumped out all her boxes and kicked her stuff all over the apartment, and did she care about that? No. The mirror that came with the place, though, that shit’s sacred.

He was so careful with her gun cleaning stuff, too. He moved it around, yeah, but he made sure not to so much as scratch anything. And is she grateful? Does she even fucking _ask?_ No. Hell no. But the _mirror_ , now.

“You’re a freak,” he informs her. She’s unimpressed.

“Wait, did you trash my place, too?” The Lieutenant Havoc guy, bordering on tearful.

“Yeah, obviously. We did all your places.”

The skinny guy, Falman, sinks down onto a chair, puts his head in his hands, and moans. Ed’s not surprised. Guy’s place was so neat it was creepy. It was a _relief_ to trash it.

Ed killed a guy once who kept like hundreds of locks of hair in plastic baggies, all labeled with a name, date, and number from one to ten, whatever the fuck that meant. He had dozens of baggies of fingernails, too—not clippings, the whole fucking nail. And then he had some test tubes full of blood. All with the labels. Thing is, Ed might never have even found out about him, except he started going for eyeballs, and that, people got upset about.

And yet the fingernails, the blood, nobody found them worth mentioning? Fucking _what?_

Anyway, yeah, that guy. His house was freakishly neat, even smelled of hospital. It was really fucking stupid of Ed to chase him to his house. For one thing, it’s not smart to chase anything into its den, and for another, weird nightmares forever. Ed ended up killing the guy just to make the skin-crawly feeling go away.

Falman’s place brought all those happy memories back. Ed’s enthusiasm for trashing it was maybe a little over the top.

“I rescued your mother’s china, Havoc,” Hughes puts in after shooting Falman a pitying glance. Havoc slumps. Ed can’t tell if it’s a happy slump or a _well, damn_ slump.

“You told him to break my clock, didn’t you?” Mustang accuses Hughes.

Hughes grins. “I didn’t _tell_ him to…but apparently I’m not the only one who hated that clock.”

Mustang sighs. What, it was a precious fucking clock, too?

“Is there a point to me being here?” Ed snaps. “Or can I go do something with my time?” He’s got no interest in standing around listening to them bitch about their furniture all damn day. He could be talking to the Xing girl. He could be chasing a homunculus. He could be—

“Since we’re past the point of subtlety,” Mustang says, “we may as well try your plan, Elric.”

Havoc just about swallows his cigarette, and Ed gives him a sour look. Jackass doesn’t know enough about Ed’s planning skills to be panicking. What’s his problem?

“So what _is_ Elric’s plan?” the fat guy—what’s his name? Breda?—asks, tossing a chess piece in the air and catching it over and over ‘til Ed wants to break his fingers. “Is it to charge out and kill everything that doesn’t look human?”

“How did you know?” Hughes murmurs. Raising himself in Ed’s estimation all the time. Asshole.

Breda catches the chess piece and stares at Hughes for a while. Then he turns to Ed, and finally to the ceiling.

“Huh.” He shrugs and starts tossing the chess piece again. “Guess I haven’t got any better ideas.”

Breda, unlike everybody else in the room, is not on Ed’s shit list. For one thing, his place was by far and away the easiest one to trash, on account of Breda’d trashed it long before Ed got there. Plus, he rolls with stuff, even when it gets weird. It’s nice.

“The sooner the better,” Mustang says like he even knows the meaning of hurrying. “Elric, do you know where any of the homunculi…live?”

“Gluttony’s been hanging around the train station, Ling says. Why?”

“Ling?” Hughes asks, stupidly surprised.

“Yeah,” Ed tells him. “Ling. I think you met the guy. What’s with the face?”

“I thought something terrible had happened to Ling Yao.”

“It did. He’s still alive, though, lucky him. We’ll see how long it lasts.”

Hughes is giving him that _look_ , he fucking _hates_ that look. It’s so stupid, they’re all gonna die in a minute, it’s too damn late for Hughes to be worrying about Ed’s lifestyle.

“Elric,” Mustang cuts in before Ed can say anything hateful. “I’d like you to take Havoc and Breda to the train station.”

“Holy shit,” Ed says, mouth pulling into a half-grin before he can stop it. “I get my own little team and everything? That’s so what the fuck. I could just go by myself, y’know. I mean, look at that guy, he’s gonna have a heart attack.”

Havoc. Seriously, he’s way too delicate for the military.

Mustang thinks so too, apparently, cuz he gives Havoc this disapproving glare. “Don’t worry about Lieutenant Havoc,” he tells Ed. “He’ll behave professionally.”

“Uh huh.” Poor bastard. “And what’re you gonna be doing while all this’s goin’ on? Sitting here bossing people around?”

“Depending on how this goes, I’ll take a team to Lab 3. Possibly as early as tomorrow.”

“You can’t take down that father guy without me,” Ed says. Not an argument, just a statement of fact.

“We’ll only be scouting, this first time,” Mustang tells him. “It’s wise to understand the lay of the land.”

Ed doesn’t actually agree with that so much. “I’ll go kill this guy, then we’ll talk.”

Mustang rolls his eyes.

* * *

Ed will say one thing for Ling: getting taken over by a homunculus was the best information-gathering move he ever made, even if it was fucking stupid by any other standard. Ask Ling for homunculi and ye shall receive.

“That’s him, huh?” Breda asks.

“That’s him.” Ed claps, transmutes his arm into a blade. Changes his mind, transmutes it back. Havoc’s giving him all panicky looks.

“Is that what I’m going to look like if I keep eating corned beef?” Breda mumbles to himself, horrified.

“Nah,” Ed tells him. “You’re gonna be more flabby.”

“Kid, I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to be a murderer and a brat at the same time. That’s gotta be too much of a good thing.”

“What’s your plan?” Havoc cuts in. “Do you really have a plan? Can you actually kill those things?”

“Can you stop asking me questions for ten goddamn seconds so I can get a word in edgewise?” Havoc stops talking. Miracle. “You go stand at the intersection on the north side. It’s empty cuz of all the construction; the slackers take like three hour lunch breaks. Me and Breda’ll drive him toward you, you distract him and trip him into that hole.”

“What’s the hole for?” Havoc asks. What is this, random spirit of inquiry?

“I dunno,” Ed says, kind of interested himself, now they’re talking about it. “Foundation? Quarry? Sewage tank? Anyway, once you get him in there, I’ll take care of him. Got it?”

“You make it sound easy,” Havoc said.

“Yeah? Good. Try not to fuck up and die, Mustang’ll get all pissed off.”

“Better move quick, Havoc,” Breda says. He whipped out a gun sometime when Ed wasn’t looking, which is creepy. Ed thought Hawkeye was the only one who could pull shit like that on him. “Because our boy here is about to do something…very…stupid.”

Havoc bolts off the roof faster than Ed thought he could move just as Breda shoots at the crane cable holding up a huge, metal I-beam. It takes a few shots, but he does manage to drop the beam right onto Gluttony’s head.

So it turns out that, like a lot of Mustang’s guys, Breda’s secretly kickass. Huh.

“You gonna move, brat, or you gonna sit there staring at me all day?”

Ed moves. And not a moment too soon, because Gluttony hoists himself up and heaves the I-beam at the roof just as Ed hits the ground.

There’s a lot of crashing. Breda yells. Ed hopes he didn’t figure out Breda was kickass just in time for him to die, because that’d be a waste.

Whatever. Worry about it later.

Havoc’s not half bad, either. He’s managed to distract Gluttony from going after Breda by getting himself chased instead. He turns to shoot Gluttony in the head every now and again with this look on his face like he just can’t believe that no matter how many times he shoots, it’s never gonna do any fucking good.

He gets Gluttony to chase him past the hole right around the time Ed gets there. Ed decides he’s a huge fan of Mustang’s team. He decides this right as Havoc trips like a spaz and falls on his face. _Here I am, homunculus. Eat me_.

Well, shit. At least the guy has lucky timing.

Ed claps and hits Gluttony from the side about a second before Gluttony grabs Havoc, knocking him down into the hole and landing on top of him. He tries to remember everything he’s worked out about breaking down Philosopher’s Stones.

It’s a little scary, this trick. The principle is basically to use your body as a ground, though it’s hopefully less fatal than doing it for electricity would be. But Ed’s never done this before, so while he’s got a pretty good handle on what ought to happen, he’s not so clear on what’s _going_ to happen. So, yeah, scary.

That said, it looks _really fucking cool_.

Blue lightning. Red flashes. Gluttony dissolving like sand, all the way down to a skeleton, and then to nothing at all. The people that made up his stone go screaming through Ed, and Ed screams right back at them because _fuck off_ , he’s doing them a _favor_ here.

And then all of a sudden it’s over. No more screaming, no more power, no more homunculus. Ed falls down in the Gluttony-dust, feeling giddy and like he’s kind of still sparking inside, and he laughs, because, hell yes, it _worked_. That’s three homunculi down, plus Greed who doesn’t count. So far so good, yeah? Three to go. _Watch out, assholes, I’m a fucking_ genius.

“Oh my God,” Havoc says. Gibbers. “You’re crazy. You are _crazy_.”

“Yeah,” Ed agrees, with a deranged giggle to prove the point. This should really not be news to anybody, but Havoc does give the impression of being kinda slow. Except when it counts.

“Holy shit, holy shit, what did you just…?”

“I think you’ll find I just saved your ass,” Ed mutters, heaving himself out of the hole. Why is he even answering these bullshit not-questions? Maybe it’s all the exposure to Hughes that’s making him soft. “The response you’re lookin’ for is, ‘Gee thanks, Mr. Demon Alchemist.’”

Havoc’s mouth is hanging open, and that is not a good look for anybody.

“You saved my life?”

“Seems that way.”

Havoc makes fish faces. “Uh.” More fish faces. “Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“No, really.” He’s pulling it together now, frowning and looking halfway intelligent. “Thank you. You didn’t have to—I mean, I’m nobody to you. So. Really, thanks.”

Ed hates it when people get all sincere and shit. How’re you meant to respond to that? It’s not like he’s such a dick that he’d stand there and _let_ a homunculus eat somebody. “Whatever.”

Havoc fidgets, looks at his hands, looks back up. He’s working himself up to say something really idiotic, Ed can tell. Guy’s about as opaque as glass, and to think he works for _Mustang_. That just ain’t right.

“You’re still crazy, though,” is what he comes out with in the end, even though his face says he thinks Ed might kill him for it. “Crazy.”

“Everybody’s gotta have a talent,” Ed says. “We can’t all be Captain Obvious.”

Havoc nods. “You got that right,” he says, happy about it for some reason. “I’m serious about defending my title.”

Second Lieutenant Jean Havoc, huh? He’s a spaz, but it’s good he’s not dead.

“Come on, let’s get back to the Colonel before he freaks the fuck out.”

Havoc lights a cigarette and starts back the way they came. “Whatever you say, Crazy.”

Ed narrows his eyes at Havoc’s back and wonders if he thinks this cute little nickname will earn him any of Ed’s goodwill. He doesn’t look _that_ stupid.

“Funny Breda hasn’t come to meet us,” Havoc says after a few steps.

“Oh, him. He might be dead,” Ed remembers.

Havoc freezes. “ _What?_ ”

“Gluttony threw that I-beam right at him,” Ed says, picking up the pace as he thinks about it, leaving Havoc standing back there dithering. “Hurry the fuck up!”

Turns out Breda’s not dead, but he’s not great, either. The beam hit the roof and knocked a big hole in it, then brought down a ton of shingles and snapped the roof off at the eaves. And you’d think Breda would’ve landed on top of all that, but it looks like it all managed to land on top of him instead.

Ed checks enough to get a general impression of a fuck ton of blood and a whole bunch of tourniquets. No bones poking out anywhere, at least. At that point, he figures he can’t do anything useful, so he stops looking. Breda’s still conscious, so hey, it can’t be as bad as it seems.

Havoc, though, has to get down on his knees and start tugging at tourniquets like that’ll do any damn good. People are weird.

“I told you _not_ to fuck up and die,” Ed reminds Breda.

Breda squints up at him. “I did it,” he gasps, “to piss you off.”

“Yeah? Well, it worked, jackass.” Ed starts backing away toward the nearest phone. “So you know who I’m gonna go call? Hawkeye.”

“You wouldn’t,” Breda wheezes.

“Oh yeah. Tell her you can’t even _duck_ right.”

“ _Brat_.”

* * *

Bringing Breda back has basically the same effect as kicking an ant’s nest. Everybody panics and runs in circles. In the end, they all flee to a new hidey hole (how many of these places does Hughes _have?_ ) and call in Knox. Knox mutters and swears and bitches at Ed and Breda both, but eventually announces that Breda’s fine.

Which is to say, he’s fine considering a building fell on him. Not the same as being honestly _fine_. He’s not gonna die, which is good, sure. But it’ll take him months to get over this.

He’s out of the game. And that’d be bad enough in itself, seeing as they weren’t playing with many pieces, but Breda’s also way more than just a piece to Mustang. Mustang is, yeah, freaking the fuck out. Storming around the place snarling out orders and brooding and looking like he might set shit on fire for the hell of it. There’s no talking to the guy.

Given the dead-inside face Mustang’s making over Breda, Ed has to wonder how he looked when they found Ed after the whole Wrath debacle. Did Ed rate the dead-inside face?

He hopes not.

Once the Breda crisis winds down, Hughes catches Ed up on everything. He says Sloth showed up at HQ around the same time Breda was failing to duck. Apparently the general Armstrong and her people and some Ishbalans and two random Xingians in black took him down. Hughes says a bunch of people died in the process, which means Ed wins the fewest maimed minions contest. Pat yourself on the back, Elric.

Hughes gets this accusing look when he mentions the Ishbalans and the Xingians, like he thinks Ed knows something. Suspicious fucker. It’s somehow more irritating that he’s not wrong: Ed does know something. In fact, Ed wrote Kael a letter laying out the apocalyptic facts. He’s spent way too much time with Mustang, see, and he’s starting to think stuff like…maybe it’d be nice if the good citizens of Central saw Ishbalans kicking monster ass on their behalf.

Then, for insurance, he mentioned to Lan Fan that the faster they kill off the homunculi, the faster she can drag her idiot prince home.

But there’s no way for Hughes to know all that, so he’s got no right to be giving Ed that look.

Hughes eventually finishes with the accusing looks and gets around to mentioning that the whole team’s going to the lab tomorrow. He says, “We’re running out of time.”

Yeah. Running out of time and people. In view of which, throwing a whole herd of people at the same old problem doesn’t seem very bright to Ed. But there’s no talking to Mustang right now.

“You’re staying here,” Ed tells Hughes.

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Why? What _why?_ Isn’t this the guy who, just a few months ago, refused point blank to get involved in anything that smacked of alchemy? What happened to that? “Because I fucking said so. What if we all get killed, huh?”

“Then Fuery will take over.”

They both look at Fuery, who’s huddled in the corner like somebody’s pet mouse, connected to a hundred different wires, doing mysterious wire-related things. Everybody’s got their gifts, yeah? But Fuery’s is for sure not orchestrating the overthrow of an evil inhuman nutjob.

“You’re staying here,” Ed says again.

Hughes sighs. “Roy said the same thing,” he admits. Which might’ve been nice to know before Ed got all worked up about it. Bastard.

* * *

In the end, they leave Hughes, Fuery, and Falman behind. Fuery and Falman because they’re better at collecting data than they are at killing people. Hughes because Ed and Mustang threatened to tie him to a chair.

Mustang and Havoc sneak into the lab first. They say it’s to get the lay of the land. Ed thinks it’s cuz they’re tired of him looking like the cool one all the time. They’re meant to check in with Ed and Hawkeye every five minutes, and they do. Twice.

“I’ll follow them,” Hawkeye says after they’ve missed the third check, calm like always, making sure all her weapons are loaded and functional. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, please call Lieutenant Colonel Hughes.”

“And then I’ll come in after you.”

“Of course.”

Hawkeye kind of rocks. Right after they first met, she cornered him for a talk. Weird from the start, cuz people don’t normally want to get Ed alone. And the first words out of her mouth were: “If you harm him in any way, I will kill you.”

Straightforward, no fucking around. Why can’t everybody be like that?

Ed said he wouldn’t hurt Mustang as long as the guy didn’t do anything unforgivable. She said, all fierce and demented, that it was _her_ job to kill Mustang if he did something unforgivable, not Ed’s. She stared him down ‘til he agreed, it was kinda terrifying. Then they had a surreal chat about killing people, which, again, is not a thing people generally want to talk to Ed about.

She said, I like to kill them from far away so I can forget about it later. He said, I like to kill them with my hands so I can never forget about it. And she _smiled_ at him.

She is one strange lady. Awesome, though. Anyway, they’ve been cool ever since.

“Gotcha,” he says. “Twenty.”

She looks at him like she doubts he’s capable of tying his shoes, let alone keeping track of time. He’s not bothered, though—she looks at everybody like that. “Try not to kill or otherwise damage yourself,” she says, and takes off.

Maybe sometimes, maybe just a little, Hawkeye reminds him of Al. Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he hates it, sometimes it scares the shit out of him. It definitely makes him want to hang around with her, which is obviously gonna end badly.

Well, it’ll end badly unless they all die this month, in which case it won’t get a chance.

So yeah, Hawkeye. She may be awesome in many ways, but Ed’s pretty sure her internal clock isn’t perfect. That’s why he calls Hughes five minutes early. Who’s seriously gonna notice the difference between fifteen minutes and twenty? Nobody.

“Wait until I get there,” Hughes says.

“Sure,” Ed tells him. Haha, yeah right, like there’s any fuckin’ way. Hughes must be tired or something, though, cuz he lets it slide.

It doesn’t take Ed long to catch up to the circus. He thought it was gonna be tough, right, cuz those labs are like mazes. But it turns out all he has to do is follow the charred meat smell and the screaming, and bam, there they are. Convenient.

Mustang’s standing over the pile of dirt and ash that probably used to be a homunculus, and Ed has to hand it to him, he looks pretty fuckin’ scary. The Flame Alchemist, huh? So this is him in action.

Ed knew he was right to like the guy.

“Yo, Mustang,” he calls out. “Maybe if you’d gotten your ass away from your desk and started helping me kill these fuckers a few months ago, we wouldn’t be in the shit like this. The hell are you so slow?”

Mustang gives him a dirty look, and hey, maybe things aren’t gonna turn out as bad as Ed thought.

Then Mustang’s eyes roll back in his head and he passes out on the floor, and that’s when Ed sees Hawkeye crumpled on the ground behind him. And notices that Havoc’s nowhere in sight.

Maybe things are gonna turn out _exactly_ the way Ed thought. Optimism: it was good while it lasted.

* * *

Ed’s first encounter with Mustang wasn’t quite as smooth as the one with Hawkeye. In fact, you could say the whole getting-to-know-Mustang process was a fucking disaster. Mustang has no idea.

The truth about how Ed met Colonel Roy Mustang is, he heard about him from the Ishbalans.

The truth is, he’d been planning on killing him.

It’s not like he just kills people on somebody else’s say-so—fuck what other people think, he only believes what he sees himself—but he’d heard the bad news on Mustang from a _lot_ of people. Mustang and Kimbley, those were the names that got tossed around. The guy who burned people to death by the hundreds, and the guy who blew up little kids and laughed.

He would’ve gone for Kimbley first, but the fucker was in jail; it was too much trouble for too little gain. That left Mustang.

Even with people insisting Mustang was evil in a uniform, the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with the military, Ed still wanted to check him out. Maybe he wouldn’t give him as much leeway as he would other people, but he wasn’t gonna whack the guy on sight, either.

Then he did see him, and everything he’d thought got thrown out, because this was the guy who’d come to pick Ed and Al up back when. Ed had only seen him through the window, but he had a memorable face. This was the guy who’d let Granny Pinako cold-shoulder him without a whimper, who’d let Winry punch him and yell at him and cry on him.

Here’s a thing that’s true: guys who are pure evil don’t let little girls cry on them. They just don’t.

He might still be _kind of_ evil, though.

Ed decided he should watch for a while before he did anything he couldn’t take back.

He was thirteen then, just about, and looking back on it now, the way he stalked Mustang all over East for three months with mild intent to kill was…yeah, pretty freaking creepy. He didn’t think so at the time, obviously. At the time, he’d just thought he was doing great research.

So he was a weird kid. Shit. He still is a weird kid.

He doesn’t regret it, though, because this is how he met Madame Christmas, and she is an awesome lady to know.

Mustang tended to go out every night with one of a handful of women, and thirteen-year-old Ed thought that was disgusting, but hell, it wasn’t a killing offense. Other than that, Mustang’s life was so monotonously predictable, the wonder of it was that the guy hadn’t offed _himself_.

One night, maybe it was around month two, a woman dropped Roy off at home, which wasn’t the normal pattern. She was a semi-regular; Ed had seen her a few times. She was probably the prettiest, but also the dumbest-looking.

Which was why it was such a shock when she turned right to Ed, dropped the vapid look like she’d never worn it, and snapped, “What do you want with him?” And damn, she sounded just like Winry.

“I don’t want shit from any of you,” Ed told her, and bolted. But the woman was persistent. Really persistent, a little scary, and definitely a bully. Her name was Vanessa.

She reminded him of Winry a _lot_.

Vanessa grilled him on his motives and made him call Madame Christmas. Chris told him to get off his ass and go talk to some of the guys who’d served with Mustang in Ishbal. “Don’t you want both sides of the story?” she asked. “Or have you adopted the military’s policy of considering only the evidence you like?”

_Burn_ , right?

Turned out, all the guys who served with Mustang thought he was mercy in uniform, the best damn thing that ever happened to the military.

It was like one of those pictures where you look at it one way, it’s a vase, you look at it the other way, it’s people’s faces. Those pictures drive Ed batshit, actually, because what the hell are they? No, seriously. _What?_

So what Ed knew about Mustang was nothing, and he really needed to look at this guy _his own_ way. He had to see for himself, up close and personal, enough with the tailing.

He killed a rapist and hung around to see who cleaned up. He knew it’d be Mustang—guy must’ve pissed off some fat general or something, cuz he always seemed to pull the crap jobs. And what with the Winry crying thing, his hanging around with Vanessa, and just the fact that he _knew_ Chris (Ed didn’t know Chris’s last name back then), Ed figured Mustang wasn’t likely to have any sympathy for rapists. Turned out Ed was right.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to jump down on the guy from a height, but, you know. He’d wanted to make a good first impression. Or at least a big first impression.

What Ed hadn’t known then, and what he knows now, is that if Hawkeye’d been there that night, Ed wouldn’t have lived to see fourteen. Small favors?

Mustang turned out to be surprisingly fun to scare the shit out of. Besides that, whatever he’d done in Ishbal, Ed could see he wasn’t a bad guy. He was trying to make up for it, even though he knew full fucking well that making up for it was impossible. Ed felt that.

And then too, when Mustang figured out who Ed was…just for a second, he looked sick.

It was the closest anyone had come to caring about Ed since he left Rizembool, and even though that was all his own fault, even though he totally didn’t deserve to have people caring about him…hell, he was weak. He wanted someone around who gave a shit whether he lived or died.

So he stayed.

* * *

“I hate being at the mercy of doctors,” Mustang gripes like a little kid. They’ve relocated _again_ (holy fucking shit, Hughes), this time to some shack on the outskirts of Central. And they’ve dragged Knox along with them, although he bolts home whenever they let him.

“I hate visiting sick people,” Ed points out, “but you don’t see me bitching about it until everybody wants to smother me with a pillow.”

“No one is forcing you to be here.”

“Actually, someone is, in that way where Hughes blinded me with glasses glare and talked at me until I ran here just to get away.”

This is so much bullshit. Hughes has been calling people, checking facts, and prying into classified files by proxy at a dead run ever since it all went down. He hasn’t had time to hassle Ed. Mustang’s been asleep for a while, though, so he can’t know that, and Hawkeye and Havoc won’t tattle: it’s not their way. Besides, they’re smirking, so they must think the idea’s funny. Ed figured they would.

Havoc’s a mess. Ed doesn’t really get it, but apparently Lust (who turns out to be the homunculus Mustang nailed) punctured him with her stabby fingers, so Mustang thought it would be a good idea to set all three of them on fire.

Yeah. Who the fuck knows? Military freaks.

Havoc can’t be too down about it, though, cuz Hughes says he’s been fighting with Mustang nonstop ever since they got stuck in a room together. Ed didn’t know the guy had it in him; he’s proud. But when Ed’s around, Havoc sits back and lets the pro handle it, which is only right.

There’s a weird undercurrent in the room, something going on with these guys that Ed doesn’t know about. It’s not like he _wants_ to know, it’s just…weird. To be here and not know when everybody else obviously does. Whatever. They’re not being weird _at Ed_ , so it should be fine.

“Duty done, then,” Mustang’s muttering resentfully. “You can go away now and leave me in peace.”

“I’ve only been here five minutes,” Ed points out. “I trucked all the way out here. You better make it worth my while.”

“How? I’m hardly up for a performance, Ed.”

Ed’s breath stops even as he tells himself he’s being an idiot. This isn’t important. He knows it isn’t important; names are never as big a deal to anybody else as they are to him, he _knows_ that.

_Breathe, you idiot_.

But to him, when you say someone’s name…you’re claiming them. You’re saying, I know you, I take responsibility for you, you’re one of mine. At least, that’s what Ed means when he says people’s names. Which is why he doesn’t, generally.

He’s pretty sure he picked up this particular gem of crazy from the Ishbalans. Clearly he hadn’t gotten enough screwball customs from his own culture, so he’d had to go looking farther afield.

He knows nobody but the Ishbalans are with him on this, and so whatever anybody else calls him, it doesn’t mean much of anything, not to them, not to him. Or it shouldn’t. But this is Mustang, this is Mustang calling him _Ed_ , and his face says he knows what that means, and it’s _bullshit_. He can’t be doing this now.

“Speaking of health, though,” Mustang says, watching Ed close like a predator, “I did mean to ask you how you go about recuperating from injuries.”

_He is not doing this_.

“I’d like to be back on my feet as soon as possible, and your recovery time is always…uncanny.” Ed can see Hawkeye turn suddenly out of the corner of his eye, but he hasn’t got enough spare brain power to wonder what that means. “What’s your secret?” Mustang asks.

_He knows, he knows, he knows_. How the fuck does he know? And now it’s a big stupid game of I know that you know that I know, and Ed’s going to lose for sure. Hell, he’s lost already.

If Mustang knows about the name thing—and he’s sure acting like he does—and if he knows what Ed’s up to—he obviously does—then what he just said was _you’re one of mine_. And what he said after that was, _you wouldn’t do to me what you’re doing to yourself_.

The only thing that ever made this healing trick okay was that no one who cared about Ed knew he was doing it. He knows how much you can hurt people who like you by hurting yourself. He’s a goddamn expert on it. And Mustang’s such a moron that he _does_ like Ed.

Part of him wants to fly off the handle at Mustang for messing with him like this, but hell, part of him always wants to fly off the handle. He doesn’t have any right. This is fair. He doesn’t have any right, and he can’t, he _can’t_ clap.

“What do you want me to say?” he rasps out.

“Nothing,” Mustang says. “I want you to stop.”

Goddamn Mustang, who asked him to care about Ed, anyway? Nobody asked him, and it doesn’t make sense. Ed should be none of his business, Ed should be on his own, nobody _asked_ him…

You _asked him, brother_.

_I know that, Al, shut up_.

Ed was the one who lurked around East forever making a spectacle of himself, might as well’ve been shouting _look at me_ —shit, he practically did ask him, how pathetic. And it doesn’t have to make sense, that’s not how this works. Mustang is sitting there pale and wild-eyed with third fucking degree burns while the country combusts, and he’s telling _Ed_ to take care of himself. No, there’s no logic here.

Ed turns to Hawkeye without much thinking about it, a _help me out_ reflex thing. She’s staring at him, probably trying to tell him something, but he can’t figure what. She’s never been as easy to read as Mustang. Still, Ed may not know what she’s trying to say, but something about her…yeah, Ed’s pretty sure Mustang already had this same basic talk with her. _Don’t go off and kill yourself, minion_. For some reason, that makes the whole thing less…what? Weird, irritating, embarrassing?

“I’ll stop,” he says. Mustang nods at him, Hawkeye smiles a little.

Ed’s suddenly pretty sure he just got played.

“I have no idea what you two are talking about,” Havoc observes, idly interested. “But the part where it looked like Crazy was gonna rip your throat out was exciting.”

“If I’d known saving your life was going to make you _insubordinate_ ,” Mustang snipes back, “I would have let you bleed out.”

Ed did promise, though. He can’t take it back now even if Hawkeye is laughing at him.

“You call this saving my life? Ruining my life is more like it. I’m _never_ gonna get a date like this. It would’ve served you right if Crazy bit you.”

“He wasn’t going to _bite_ me. And more importantly, you’re raising ingratitude to an art form!”

Besides, they’d played him for his own good. He has no clue how you’re supposed to act about that. Everybody who did things for him before—they were pretty direct about it. Teacher, Winry, Al, Mom. If they were doing things for his benefit, they told him so, and then generally followed it up with a punch or a wrench or a knife.

But mind games are Mustang’s weapon of choice. Is this basically the same as Winry throwing a wrench at him?

“Ah, and here you all are!” Hughes says happily from the doorway like it’s a surprise. “I brought presents!” He whips out a stack of reports.

Military. Freaks.

“Edward,” Hawkeye calls softly, as Hughes makes fun of Mustang and Havoc bitches about how Knox won’t let him smoke. Ed heads over to her. “How _were_ you healing yourself?”

Huh. Weird that Hawkeye’s asking this when he already said he’d stop. “What do you care?”

“I only have a theoretical understanding of alchemy,” she says, which is Hawkeye-speak for _stop asking me stupid fucking questions_. Ed respects that.

“There’s….” He stops and checks behind him. Sure, Mustang’s pretty much guessed what he was up to, but there’s a difference between being pretty sure and _knowing_ , and Ed doesn’t feel like seeing his face if he _knows_. But he’s still arguing with Hughes about something and they look like they could go on all day, so it’s probably safe. He turns back to Hawkeye, who’s raised an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, okay, sorry for doubting your sneakiness,” he mutters, and she smiles. “Same idea as the Philosopher’s Stone. Difference is, I was using my life, not somebody else’s.”

She blinks, and he can see her working through the implications of that. She scowls at him.

“Shut up,” he whispers. “Like you can talk.”

“Would it work on me?”

Ed’s mind totally blanks out for a second, but of course it doesn’t do him a favor and stay that way. Hawkeye wants him to transmute her better, but he knows how Hawkeye feels about alchemy. She hates it. So if she wants him to transmute her better, then…

Then she’s fucking dying.

“Whoa, _what?_ You look fine!” he hisses. This is no time for Mustang to be overhearing them; he’d flip his shit for sure.

“For now,” she says calmly, quietly. “But not for long. Medicine never seems to progress as quickly as weaponry in Amestris. I seem to have an infection. Dr. Knox doesn’t think I’m going to survive.”

“Fuck!”

“Quiet!” she snaps, checking behind him. Luckily, Hughes is crazy loud. “Will it work or won’t it?”

“On an infection? I don’t fucking know, Hawkeye, cuz I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Usually I just patch up holes, okay? It’s not like I’m a goddamn doctor, I _kill_ people for a living.”

“Will you try?”

Will he try? Shit, he doesn’t even know where he’d _start_. When he maims himself, it’s pretty straightforward—if there’s a hole where there shouldn’t be, he fills it in. Veins connect to veins, arteries to arteries. Wrath did him the favor of not actually cutting through his intestines that time, thanks for that. Organs are a bitch, but as long as they don’t get his heart, he figures he should be fine. (If they ever do get his heart, he’s fucked, because that shit gets serious way too fast). But infection? He’d have to know what’s supposed to be there and what isn’t, he’d have to figure out how to clear bad stuff out without taking the good stuff—and there _is_ good bacteria, he remembers that much. Shit, _shit_. He knows a hundred ways to kill a person organized into ten distinct degrees of painful, but only the most basic first aid. And if that doesn’t say it all. If he had Winry here—no, hell, if he had Knox—

Hang on. He does have Knox.

“How long do they think you got?”

“Not as long as I’d like.”

And he thought _he_ was good at slithering around questions. “I gotta talk to somebody. I’ll know tomorrow.”

Hawkeye nods, still calm. “If I die,” she says like it’s nothing, “someone will need to look after the Colonel.”

“Yeah, and you’re telling me this why?”

She shoots him an eloquent look.

“No, Hawkeye. No. No _fucking_ _way_ , you can’t be serious, this is—”

“Breathe.”

“ _Shut up_ , you’re crazy, you’re insane—”

“‘Like you can talk,’” she quotes back at him, which is totally cheating. Hawkeye cheats. “Promise me you’ll look after the Colonel.”

“I’m not promising you shit—”

“If I die, you’ll feel like you owe me, won’t you? Do this, and we’ll be even. Promise me.”

Ed closes his eyes and thinks about how Hawkeye really is the evilest jerk he’s ever met, and _damn_ , she reminds him of Al. “Fine. Fuck you. I promise.”

“What are you two talking about?” Mustang asks suspiciously. Ed gives him a _look_ , then turns back to Hawkeye in time to see that she’s giving him pretty much the same look.

“Uh oh. Looks like they have joined forces, Roy,” Hughes says, cheerful and nuts as always. “Hobble for your life.”

* * *

“Oh, wonderful. It’s _you_.”

Knox drags him inside, leans out to cast a paranoid glance up and down the street, then slams the door shut.

“When I said, ‘Never darken my doorstep again,’” he hisses, “what did you think I meant by that?”

Ed shrugs and grins.

“Stop with that face or I swear to God I’ll throw you out into the street.”

Ed freaking loves his scar. When he got it, he sat in front of a piece of mirror for like an hour, testing out how it made even totally sweet expressions look psychotic. The scar is _awesome_.

“I got a question,” he says. “Kind of urgent. You’re totally tainted by association anyway, who’re you kidding?”

“Elric,” Knox sighs, pulling him further into the house and turning him to face left. “This is my son.”

Holy shit, Knox has a kid.

Well, kid, hell. He’s probably got ten years on Ed. But he’s so fucking _normal_. And you look at Knox—he’s obviously done a lot of bad shit and seen even worse. Burned out and burned down, just like Mustang and Hawkeye and Hughes. And Ed. But this guy, the son, he’s got a face like he’s never seen a bad thing.

Knox protected him. How the hell did he manage that?

“Pleased to meet you…Elric?” The son holds out his hand.

Ed turns to Knox. “I wouldn’t have come.” It’s for some reason really important that Knox understand this. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have.”

The son’s hand drops awkwardly. Let him be awkward—he doesn’t know what he’s asking for.

“You wouldn’t have come?” Knox asks, arms folded, stubborn chin jutting. He’s such a belligerent bastard. “Why not?”

Ed seriously considers saying _because I have maggots for blood_ to see what Knox would do. He restrains himself, though. Hey, check it out, he _does_ have some self-control. Up yours, Mustang. “Because you’ve got family here, asshole. Look, just answer my question and I’ll get out, stop darkening your doorstep, whatever.”

Knox sighs and rubs at his forehead. “I see what Hughes meant,” he says. Being cryptic on purpose. Fucker.

“You gonna answer my question or not?”

“Should I leave?” asks the son.

“No, dipshit, this is your dad’s goddamn house,” Ed cuts in before Knox can say anything stupid. “If you want _me_ out, I’ll go, but _you_ shouldn’t be going anywhere—this is so fucked up. What’re you supposed to do for infection?”

“You have an infection?” Knox asks, alarmed. Once a patient, always a patient?

Ed says, “No,” and leaves it at that, because it shouldn’t freaking matter whose infection it is. Why is everybody so goddamn nosy?

“Is it a kid?” Knox goes on. “Did you pick up another stray?”

“I don’t pick up fucking _strays_ , what the—look, are you gonna answer or am I gonna leave?”

“Then it’s Havoc? No, he would’ve told me. Mustang? No. It’s Hawkeye, isn’t it? What are you two up to? If you kill my patient—”

“If you’d fuckin’ _talk_ to me, I wouldn’t kill your damn patient!”

“It was my understanding that Amestrian alchemy was mostly good for blowing things up. Was I mistaken? Is our alchemy actually a healing thing of beauty? Do tell.”

“Fuck you, this wasn’t—” Ed closes his eyes and rubs them for a second before he realizes that probably makes him look upset and shit. He drops his hands and glares. “Look, just, back to theory. How do you take care of a basic infection? Like, what do you kill? How do antibiotics know what to kill?”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this, kid,” Knox says.

“Antibiotics don’t, um, ‘know what to kill,’” the son pipes up. Halleluiah, another country heard from. “They inhibit processes the bacteria need to survive.”

“Yeah?” Ed says, mildly interested. “And that’s not working why?”

“Hypothetically?” Knox asks like the bad-tempered shit he is.

“In one more minute, asshole, I am gonna tell your son about that time you tied me to your bed.”

“What!?”

“It was medical!”

“ _What?_ ”

_Brother!  
_  
Ed thinks hanging around with Chris has probably killed the few social skills he once had. It’s not his fault she’s got an infectious sense of humor.

Speaking of infection. “Antibiotics aren’t working why?” he repeats impatiently.

“Sometimes antibiotics just can’t do enough, young doctor-assassin,” Knox tells him. “Since we’re clearly talking about Hawkeye, I’ll tell you that I’m not sure what her problem is. But if she’s really, really unlucky, she’s got peritonitis.”

“What happens when you get that?”

“Secondary peritonitis, presenting this late? Generally speaking, you die.”

“What do you _do_ about it, jackass? I’m guessing you don’t stand around and weep.”

“It sounds like it would take surgery at this point,” the son says. Clearly Ed should have walked in, abducted the son, and interrogated him in private. Fucking Knox. “But if the patient—”

“Don’t encourage him, son,” Knox snaps. “What you need to understand, kid, is that if you try any idiotic theories out on my patient, I will _hamstring you_.”

“So I’ll just sit back and watch you let her die,” Ed says.

It was not, he reflects later from his position on his ass on the sidewalk, the most diplomatic comment he could’ve come out with.

You gotta respect the guy’s balls, though. Last person who violently threw Ed out a door was Izumi Curtis.

Ed stands up and brushes himself off. He passes under the open window (‘ _Dad, was he a patient? Did you help him before?’ ‘That kid is beyond help’_ ) and out into the street, and he thinks, _Well. The good news is we all die someday anyway_.

Hawkeye’s ahead of her game, is all.

* * *

It takes Ed a few days to get back to the safe house. He figures since Hawkeye’s pretty much fucked and there’s nothing he can do about it, he might as well take the time to check in with Greed. Greed, maybe not surprisingly, freaks out about Ed going off and almost getting murdered—and with _Mustang’s crew_ , what a traitor.

Takes Ed ten minutes flat to convince Greed he’s just buttering Mustang up to eventually be Greed’s minion. Ed can’t believe that actually worked. For a guy who wants to rule the world, Greed’s surprisingly dumb. (Or maybe you have to be dumb to want to rule the world. Mustang.)

Whatever, Ling is so gonna win the fight for that body, it’s not even funny.

When Ed does get back to the safe house, he finds it all quiet and Havocless. Hawkeye says Havoc’s way more broken than they thought, like as in he can’t fucking walk. So he’s out of the game, too. She says Havoc’s mom came and dragged him home, which must’ve been some show. Mustang, meanwhile, has Knox’s permission to stagger around outside a little; that’s where he is. So for now it’s just Ed and Hawkeye.

“I’ve been reading a ton of stuff on peritonitis,” Ed tells her, arms folded, scowling. “And expert medical opinion is that you should really try not to get stabbed in the gut, because that way, right, you probably won’t get it. You fail, Hawkeye. Come on, let’s see the damage.”

“I’m not sure that would be proper,” Hawkeye says, and Ed honestly can’t tell if she’s messing with him or not.

“Yeah, you know me,” says Ed. “I get all hot and bothered by older women who’re rotting on the inside.” Broken bottles. “ _Show me_.”

“Hm,” she says, and pulls her shirt up over her stomach. Mostly there’s not much to see but bandages, but it gives him a feel for where the jab through the gut is, and the slice along the ribs. Once he’s taken that in, she tugs the shirt down a little and he can see she got nailed through her right shoulder, too. Those spear fingers had a hell of a range.

“You right-handed?”

She nods, and demonstrates, now he’s paying attention, that she can’t even make a fist.

“Gonna be a real bitch to learn to shoot with your off hand,” Ed mutters. He has no idea why that makes her smile. Well, maybe because she thinks gut rot is the pressing problem and everything else is just funny.

“It’ll take some time,” she allows. “You’ll look after the Colonel in the meantime.”

“I will, huh?”

“I was tired of waiting for you to find a purpose.”

She was tired of waiting, so she just assigned him purpose. That is so totally her. _Bossy_.

And the sad fact is that if she’d just do everybody a favor and not die, Ed would trail around after Mustang like a dog forever if she asked. Not that he’s gonna come out and admit that, but. Yeah. He would.

Equivalent exchange, right? Ha ha, fuck.

“You better relearn to shoot fast, because if it goes on too long, I’ll kill him myself.”

“You promised,” she says, which is a pretty shitty thing to point out.

“Lift your shirt again,” he orders, ignoring her.

“…All right.” She looks amused like the wacko she is.

Sometimes it seems like everybody Ed knows is crazy. Maybe like attracts like. Then again, maybe it’s just that _everybody’s_ crazy, you know, in the world. That would explain a lot.

Hawkeye hoists her shirt up again, and he touches the edge of the bandages. She better not be hot to the touch, because if she is, then she’s a dead woman, as far as Ed can tell. He doesn’t know what he thinks his research is gonna accomplish. It’s not like Knox is wrong. All Ed’s good for is killing people.

She seems normal temperature. But hell, does an infection of the innards even make it to the skin? Ed has no fucking clue. He stares at the stumps of his fingers against her bandages. They are both unbelievable morons. “Look, if you’re leaning on me for this, you’re fucked for sure. You know that, right? Because asking a murderer to heal you is the stupidest thing I ever heard and I have heard some _stupid things_.”

“Calm down, Edward.”

“Easy for you to say! If this goes to shit, you’ll be _dead_ , so what’ll you care?”

“Well, I won’t care. I’ll be relieved of all cares. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Ha fucking ha. Asshole.”

Mustang chooses this moment to hobble in, because he’s that kind of guy. Ed realizes he’s blatantly standing there with a hand up Hawkeye’s shirt, and despite the fact that they were in the middle of a totally depressing conversation, he has to grin.

“Wow,” he says. “Awkward.” He pulls the hand back and refuses to let himself laugh hysterically. Or to look at Hawkeye, whose expression will definitely make him laugh hysterically. “Same time tomorrow?” he asks, glancing sideways at her so he can’t really see her face.

“Always a pleasure, Edward,” she answers, voice dry.

Ed bites savagely down on his lip and saunters past Mustang with a little wave. They’re a good team, him and Hawkeye. Not just anybody can stun Mustang into silence.

This is why Hawkeye can’t die. She can’t. That’s all there is to it. They’ll figure something out.

He wishes he knew where the Xing girl went off to.

* * *

The problem with looking for the Xing girl is, he’s got no idea where to even start. When you’re looking for serial killers, you start with places that cater to their, whatever, weird obsessions. When you’re looking for a little girl who doesn’t seem to _have_ an obsession (or at least, not one people can make money off of), then fuck, Ed has no idea what you do. Put up a missing poster?

The longer he looks, the more this seems like a fucking waste of time. Ed knows what death looks like, and Hawkeye looks like death. He should be cutting her loose and getting used to the idea of not having her around. Spare himself some pain later.

Except he never has known when to quit.

“Ed! Where are you headed on this fine, sunny day?”

You have to hand it to Hughes, his timing’s so bad it’s almost superhuman. “Fuck off.”

“Now, now, don’t be like that. I saw you going for a stroll and I thought to myself, what a nice day for a stroll!”

Ed sighs and tries to control a twitch (no dice). He keeps walking and Hughes trots along beside him, talking nineteen to the dozen about random shit Ed doesn’t bother tuning in to. He always talks about the same crap anyway: his kid, his wife, overthrowing the government. Whatever.

No little Xing girl here, there, or anywhere, but as they get to the downtown, the streets are all blocked on account of Civil Unrest. The good people of Central may not have the staying power for a proper riot, but goddamn, they will hang around in the street and _bitch_ ‘til hell won’t have it.

Ed looks up. It’ll probably be easier to go by roof than to go around. That’ll get him to the slums on the west side, which may or may not be where the Xing girl is. Who the fuck knows? Worth a shot. He starts to climb.

“Rooftops, Ed?” Hughes whines. “Do we have to?”

“You don’t have to do shit. _I’m_ going by rooftop.”

Hughes grumbles to himself but climbs up anyway. Ed does not get Hughes at all. Like, not at all. The fuck’s he thinking, following Ed around? It’s not like it hasn’t burned him before, the idiot.

Except he’s not an idiot, not really. That’s the puzzling thing.

“I’m happy you and Lieutenant Hawkeye are friends,” Hughes announces out of nowhere once they’re on the roof and he’s gotten his breath back. This could mean a lot of things, depending on whether or not he’s talked to Mustang lately. He could be serious. He could be fucking with Ed. Impossible to say.

“Shut up.” Always a safe response with Hughes, and there’s the vague possibility it’ll work. It does every once in a while.

Ed doesn’t want to talk about Hawkeye when she’s dying and he’s not doing a thing to stop it. On top of the shitty timing, Hughes has a real sixth sense for Topics Ed Doesn’t Want to Touch.

“I can almost understand the appeal,” Hughes is saying, thoughtful. “You’re both so talkative, you must talk constantly when you’re together. No one else could put up with the din.”

He thinks he’s funny. Great. “You got it. How’d you know?”

He answers, but Ed’s not listening. There’s somebody down on the sidewalk, a guy, not the Xing girl. Ed isn’t especially on the lookout for any men right now, but something about this one, something…

Blond guy. Very familiar blond. And even from above, those shoulders, that walk…

The man squints up at the sun for a second, giving Ed a good look at his face. Ed claps before his conscious mind has a chance to register what he’s seeing.

“That man looks enough like you to be related,” Hughes whispers. “Closely related. God, Ed, please tell me you didn’t just take one look at your father and transmute your arm into a weapon.”

Ed doesn’t get why Hughes is so into denying obvious reality.

“My father is a dick,” he says. “And he’s up to something. What the hell’s he doing in Central _now?_ Fucker burned through any benefit of the doubt I might’ve given him years ago.”

“Ed, for the sake of my sanity, please talk to him before you attack him. Please. Do it for me as a member of the League of Fathers.”

Ed considers ignoring that, but despite what his crazy mouth is saying, Hughes has on his serious face. A serious Hughes is no one to screw around with. Ed claps his arm back to normal, for now. “Whatever, I guess it won’t hurt anything. But you stay here. Stay the fuck out of it. I mean it, Hughes. _Stay out of it_.”

Hughes nods reluctantly. Ed’s got no doubt he’d love to be down there between them making happy fucking families, but this isn’t gonna be like that.

Ed runs along the rooftop until he’s level with his worthless dad, then drops down right in front of him. Bastard doesn’t even have the decency to look surprised.

“Long time no see, Van Hohenheim,” Ed says with a smile that isn’t very friendly, probably wouldn’t have been friendly even pre-scar—but hey, Hughes can’t say he didn’t try.

Hohenheim blinks at him. “Edward?” he asks.

_Congratulations, buddy. You know your own goddamn kid_. “That’s right, I’m Edward. You’re quick on the uptake. Then again, I come down off the roof in front of you, and you don’t so much as jump. The hell’s wrong with you? Apart from the obvious.”

The dickhead says, “I’m a monster,” and Ed laughs in his face.

“Well,” he says, “you sure as shit bred one.”

“So I hear,” Hohenheim murmurs, like he’s got a right to comment on anything Ed’s ever done. “Edward. You’ve grown up very wild, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve known I couldn’t be trusted on my own,” Ed snarls. “What the fuck were you thinking? No, you know what? I don’t give a shit anymore. What the fuck’re you _doing_ here?”

“I had some business in Central,” Hohenheim answers, totally unruffled. “You burned down my house,” he adds as an afterthought.

“What, you want an apology?” Son of a bitch is _unbelievable_.

“I’d like to know why.”

“I’d like Mom and Al to be alive. We all got problems, asshole.”

He stands there quiet, and Ed’s getting more pissed off with every breath. This is the guy who left them, he _left_ them, and he comes back now. Now that Mom is dead and Ed was stupid and Al died and Ed should have fucking died and there’s nothing _left_. And it’s like he doesn’t even care. Ed wants to destroy him so much he can already taste the blood.

But Al-voice doesn’t want him dead. _He_ is _our father_ , it says. Like that ever counted for shit with Hohenheim. But Al’s right, Al’s almost always right, even when he’s just a hole in Ed’s psyche. Hohenheim’s their father, doesn’t matter if he sucks at it. Ed grits his teeth and forces himself not to clap.

_Don’t clap don’t clap don’t clap_.

“Trisha promised to wait for me,” Hohenheim says, and Ed’s so busy picturing a gaping, bleeding hole in his chest that he almost misses the fact that the bastard sounds disappointed. But not quite.

“You’re blaming her for _dying?_ ” Ed demands. “She only died because you ditched her and she had to raise us alone. You practically killed her yourself, asshole!”

Hohenheim gives him this look, a _father_ look. And, annoying as fuck, there’s some tiny part of Ed that feels it, that’s still the kid who wouldn’t share candy with Al or whatever. He’d thought that part of him was totally dead, and the proof that it isn’t throws him off as bad as Barry the Chopper. “ _What?_ ” he all but screams.

“You say I killed your mother by leaving her,” the bastard says, “but you left Pinako and her granddaughter and never looked back.”

It wasn’t like that. It _wasn’t_ , they didn’t need him, couldn’t _want_ him after everything he’d—

But Winry’d come to see him and she said—

But that’s because Winry doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about, she should’ve stayed away. He was doing them a favor, he’s human goddamn poison, it’s not the same. He’s not like _fucking Hohenheim!_

_Brother, stop!_

“I, at least, always planned to come back,” Hohenheim says, cool and untouchable like he always fucking was. He was always perfect. Always big and tall and strong and far away, and Ed had actually thought that was what a dad was supposed to be, he’d thought Hohenheim was the goddamn be-all and end-all, _but he left them_ , and—

And Ed feels the break, that cold, calm snap in his mind.

It’s about time.

“You’re too late,” he says, and smiles, and Hohenheim would never see this coming. “Maybe it runs in the family. You’re worthless and I’m worthless and there’s nothing left. And hey, I knew that already, but thanks for coming back and pointing it out.”

Al’s voice never bothers him when he goes cold. Not even when he’s about to kill their father.

It’s a good feeling, smooth, quiet, and everything’s sharp and clear and black around the edges. He can barely hear the clap of his hands or the crackle of the transmutation. He can barely hear Hughes’s shout, and shit, how had he managed to forget Hughes was even there?

Oh well. Doesn’t matter now. Hughes won’t make it in time.

He runs for Hohenheim, and Hohenheim must not realize he’s serious, because he never lifts a hand to save himself. Ed slams an automail blade right into his chest.

It’s like slamming it into fucking granite, and it hurts like a bitch all the way up through his shoulder. They both fall over, Hohenheim onto the ground and Ed onto Hohenheim, and some crazy part of Ed’s brain thinks, Well at least _gravity_ works on him.

The dust settles.

“You would have killed your own father?” Hohenheim asks sadly. Apparently this is disappointing, but not a huge deal.

“You were never a father to us!” Ed shouts like it even matters now. “And what the fuck _are_ you?”

Hohenheim blinks up at him. “I’m a monster.”

Ed pushes himself up and claps to transmute the blade back into an arm, then punches Hohenheim in the chest for all the good it’ll do. “Don’t give me a bullshit answer! Not even a homunculus could sit there and fucking _blink_ at me after I tried to put my arm through him. What _are_ you? And what am _I_ , cuz you’re my _dad_ , aren’t you?”

_Shit, I’m babbling_. Ed shuts up and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and tries to get a grip. He doesn’t know what the hell’s going on anymore. The world is ending, his worthless dad isn’t human, and Ed actually tried to _kill_ him, which is just not—you don’t _kill your own dad_ , what the _fuck?_

And now that he thinks about it, he’s kneeling on the guy’s chest having hysterics, which can’t be comfortable even if he isn’t human. Ed slides his hands away from his eyes back to his temples. Hohenheim’s still staring at him like an idiot. Ed moves off to the side and tries to figure out what you say to your estranged inhuman dad when you just sort-of-accidentally almost impaled him.

He’s pretty sure this isn’t covered in normal etiquette. Fuck.

_You could always apologize, brother_.

Al-voice thinks it’s more helpful than it actually is.

“No, for—I didn’t mean to _kill my own dad_ ,” he announces, even though that question was way back there. “You don’t kill your dad, that’s evil. Insane.” Which says _I’m evil and insane_ loud and clear, doesn’t it? “Sorry.” Sorry for freaking everything. No joke.

No response for a while. Hell, Ed wouldn’t know what to say to all this either. But then Hohenheim’s hand comes up, slow, unsure, and he acts like he’s gonna touch Ed’s head, but he doesn’t. His hand just hovers there, and Ed wishes—shit, he wishes he hadn’t tried, he wishes he’d never seen Hohenheim again in his life.

“Can’t touch me, huh?” Ed laughs, because in a way, it is pretty damn funny. Guy let Ed try to stab him and punch him and sit on him and whatever, and now he can’t even bring himself to touch him. Where’s the logic? “Guess I can’t hold it against you.” And he can’t. There’s the other thing that’s funny: Ed’s brain. Funnier than a barrel of monkeys.

But Hohenheim gets a determined look Ed recognizes from the mirror, and he runs his hand over Ed’s hair like he has to, like he wants to, like he’s afraid to. And the little kid part of Ed wants to cry, and if he cries, then he’ll die of embarrassment and it’ll all be over, freaking _finally_.

“You’re crazy,” he mutters, but doesn’t move away. “I just tried to fuckin’ kill you.”

Silence for a long time. Not a chatty guy, Hohenheim. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there,” he says after like an hour, and Ed has to slam his hands back over his eyes before he disgraces himself. More than he already has.

_Sorry I couldn’t be there_. What good does that do after all this time? None. And something stupid like that should definitely not be making Ed feel this way.

It’s too much, that’s all. This year’s been way too fucking much. End of the goddamn world, for one thing. And then Mustang and Hughes and Hawkeye, all pushing at him and pushing at him, refusing to leave him alone. Teacher, who talked to him even though he is what he is. Winry, who found him and treated him like he was normal and it was too weird. Now this. _This_. And he may hate the bastard, but God, he’s the only family Ed has left. And Ed tried to kill him.

“Ed?” Hughes. Ed had forgotten he was there again. This is such a shit day. “Ed, are you okay?”

“No, Hughes, I am not freaking _okay_ ,” Ed snaps, and drops his hands, because it looks like he’s not gonna cry after all. Maybe he’s forgotten how. “I’m pretty sure I’ve lost it. What does it look like?” Before Hughes can answer, Ed pokes at Hohenheim’s chest with an automail finger and says, “Lose the shirt. Let’s see it.”

Hohenheim unbuttons the shirt without a whimper. Ed’s amazed by all this cooperation. He sure as hell wouldn’t be this cooperative if he were in Hohenheim’s place.

Not a mark on the guy. Seriously, what the fuck?

“So what are you? And if you say _monster_ , I am gonna do my best to beat the shit out of you.” Should relieve his feelings, if nothing else.

Hohenheim’s giving him a measuring-up look. Ed doesn’t know what’s left to measure. Seems to him he’s already failed by every conceivable standard.

“I’m a Philosopher’s Stone,” says Hohenheim.

A Philosopher’s Stone. Hang on, _what?_ Can people even _be_ Philosopher’s Stones?

Can people get hit in the chest with an automail knife and walk away without a scratch? Hell no. Okay. So working from the impossible, then.

Philosopher’s Stone. A pure substance, can’t be destroyed, or so the books say. Philosopher’s Stone: essence of dead people.

His dad is essence of dead people. What does that make him and Al? Half-living? Is this better or worse than maggot blood? Al seemed so normal, though.

It’s a goddamn joke. What do you get when you cross a Philosopher’s Stone and a human? Him and Al. What kind of lame punchline is that?

“Keep talking,” Ed says, and Hughes settles next to him, wide-eyed and grim.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final part of the Demon Alchemist series.
> 
> _“Shut up,” Ed tells Hughes, who hasn’t actually said anything. “I’m having a shit day because it’s the end of the world. Cut me some slack.”_

The bottom line is, Edward Elric has a secret fucking weapon for a dad. Worthless dad, awesome secret weapon.

There’s probably a metaphor there, but Ed doesn’t want to think about it.

And unlike Ed, this secret weapon can fix things as well as break them, which is the reason Ed’s dragging his worthless dad to the safe house before he’s really sure of the guy. Tick tock, right? He can regret it later.

They walk in the door to find Mustang out in the hall bent double like he’s been sucker-punched. Only when they’re practically on top of him does he tip his head up, but he’s staring though them, not seeing anything.

Ed’s not exactly an expert on the human condition, but he knows this look inside and out. It’s the look of somebody who’s just had everything he relies on get ripped away, and nothing he could do to stop it.

He’s too late.

Too late. Too _fucking late_ , too late for Hawkeye, too late for Al, too late for his mom—and Hawkeye said he’s supposed to look out for Mustang, the fuck was she thinking? He’s never around when anybody needs him; they all slip through his fingers and break, one after another, he shouldn’t ever touch _anybody_ , he’s poison. Did he think that had changed? Had he actually managed to _forget_ what happened to just about every fucking person he’s ever loved? What the _fuck was he thinking?_

He slams his hands together, and the world shatters like glass around him.

Later—he doesn’t know how much later, and he doesn’t know what happened between; all he has are images and colors, fragments—he realizes he’s on the floor. Or, to be specific about it, the crying Armstrong’s pinning him to the floor and looking at him like he’s a wild animal escaped from the zoo. Where the hell’d Armstrong even come from?

“Get off me.” He’s hoarse, the way he is when he’s been screaming. Shit. “What happened?”

“Top ten most unsettling questions I have ever heard asked,” says a husky, dazed voice Ed recognizes as Hughes’s. “Item the first: ‘What happened?’ courtesy of one Edward Elric, who had just been prevented from destroying a building and killing us all—apparently by accident! Ah ha ha!”

So that’s why Armstrong’s looking at him like that.

Hughes stands up and brushes himself off. He’s a little wild-eyed, but, well. Fair enough. “I’m going to check on Lieutenant Hawkeye,” he says. “Major, don’t let him move.”

Shit, _Hawkeye_.

Ed tries to throw himself out of Armstrong’s grip, but it’s like wrestling a goddamn mountain. If he’d been in anything like his right mind, he’d never have let a beast this big pin him. It’s a sad fact, but his best bet is to try to talk his way out of this.

“Seriously, Major, you can let me go now. Uh, sorry about that. But I’m okay now. I just wanna see Hawkeye, I just wanna see—” Armstrong’s still staring at him with that fucking horrified face—“I’m not gonna _do_ anything, just let me, let me— _fuck_ you, I’ll _kill_ you, get _off_ me, I’m—”

“Major,” Hughes says from the door to Hawkeye’s room, luckily before Ed has time to verbally dig himself any deeper. “You can bring him in now.”

Armstrong stands, hoists Ed up, and turns him facing forward. He grabs him by the upper arms and lifts, so Ed’s feet don’t even touch the ground.

_Good job talking him into believing you’re a-okay, Elric. You’ve got a brilliant fucking future as a negotiator_.

He’s amazed Al-voice has no comment on this. Maybe it’s off laughing to itself too hard to comment.

It doesn’t matter, though, none of it matters, because they take him to Hawkeye’s room anyway, and he can see in a second that she’s fine.

She’s fine. She’s totally fine, out but breathing easy, and Knox is even _smiling_. This is the happiest damn sick room Ed’s ever seen. She’s fine, fine, fine. He wasn’t late this time.

He didn’t kill this one. He didn’t kill Hawkeye.

Shit, Mustang almost gave him a heart attack and made him blow up the building for nothing. He lurches forward in Armstrong’s grip and bares his teeth at the idiot. “You _asshole_ , you said she was _dead!_ ”

“I did not say she was dead, Elric. I didn’t say anything. Whatever assumptions you may have made—”

“Oh my God, shut up, you were acting like it was the _end of the world_. What was I supposed to think, you fucking drama queen!?”

“She was in surgery. Knox said she probably wouldn’t survive. I wasn’t being dramatic, I thought—” Mustang stops, closes his eyes, presses his lips together in a flat line like it hurts.

She almost died, then. She really almost died, not just, you know, in a few weeks, but _right fucking now_. Oh. Oh shit, that was close. If not for Hohenheim…

“Where’s Hohenheim, anyway? Bastard does his good deed for the day and then wanders off?”

Why Ed should care is a mystery. He wants to talk to the guy, but it doesn’t need to happen this minute. It’s not that. So what?

_You miss him_.

Al-voice has this awesome timing. And hell, there’s no _end_ to the pathetic. How’s he managing to miss a guy he hasn’t seen for years?

Mustang’s recovered enough to make weird eyebrows at him. “Yes, apparently. Like father like son, perhaps,” he says.

Ed’s eyes fly wide, the snarl is totally out of his control. He feels like he’s gonna puke and he just about dislocates his shoulder trying to wrench away from Armstrong.

Mustang acts unimpressed. And Ed would believe that a lot more if he didn’t reek of fear sweat.

Mustang, though, he’s used to fighting when he’s scared. It’s part of what makes him cool. His face never changes, he just stares Ed down and says, “You’ll wake the Lieutenant.”

Ed slumps like he’s a puppet and Mustang cut his strings. Hawkeye. He was about to lose it in _Hawkeye’s room_ for fuck’s sake. He really is gonna puke now, and no wonder. This day is bullshit, what the hell else are they gonna throw at him? _Fuck_.

And now he’s hanging from Armstrong’s hands panting like a mad dog. In front. Of Mustang.

“Major, let’s step outside,” Mustang says. And that’s fine, that’s good. Once they get outside, Ed’s out. He’s had it, it’s too much, he’s fucking going into hiding until the world is less nuts. It’s not brave, it’s not even sane, but that _will_ be what he does, even if he has to dislocate one arm and detach the other to do it.

They get about ten steps from the building and Ed’s just tensing himself for a full-on fight when Mustang says, “Set him down, Major.”

“Colonel?” Armstrong asks, and Ed would snarl on principle, but he’s too confused. Mustang nods and Armstrong sets him reluctantly down.

Mustang’s gonna let him go? That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Doesn’t he want to ask about, like, Hohenheim, Philosopher’s Stones, the way Ed almost blew up the damn safe house? He does. He has to.

He’s letting Ed go?

Ed takes an experimental step back. Nobody tries to stop him.

Mustang’s messing with his mind again. Doesn’t matter. Ed’s grateful anyway. “Ask Hughes,” he says. “He pretty much knows what I do.”

Mustang nods.

Ed tips his head to the side and, despite the day, he smiles. This guy, he honestly trusts Ed. Even after _today_ , he still trusts Ed. Seriously, how wacky can you get?

“Thanks, Roy.”

He runs like hell before Mustang has a chance to change his crazy mind.

* * *

Ed goes on a smashing spree when he gets to his place. Hughes wants to know why he doesn’t care about central heating? Cuz it’s worth it. It’s worth it that he can break everything in the house and it won’t matter because, hell, that shit was broken anyway.

That lasts him a couple hours. Once he’s worn himself out and feels less like the ground is cracking apart, he collapses and checks out his hands. They’re bleeding all over the fucking place, not really a surprise. From the glass, right? (Hey, no maggots.) He thinks about fixing them with alchemy as a sort of _fuck you, Roy Mustang_ , but that’s not fair. A deal’s a deal. Besides, it’s not even Roy he’s pissed at, it’s freaking _life_.

Which is pathetic, and he’s giving himself exactly one day to get over it and get off his ass.

Or that’s what he decides on the first day. Of course he instantly gets sick after that. Whenever there’s too much crazy, his body starts failing him, and that’s a bitch, because his body’s pretty much all he’s got. His soul’s gotta be rotten through by now, and his brain’s prone to misfiring at the best of times. And this for sure isn’t the best of times.

In a way, getting sick is nice, though. Gives him an excuse to hide and lick his wounds. Not have to deal with Roy. Or Hughes. Or Hohenheim. He’d like to check on Hawkeye, but he’s not ready to deal with her, either. Anyway she’s fine, he saw. She’s fine.

He thinks about dragging himself to the desert, but that’s not a great idea. Not now, down to less than three weeks (eighteen days). Shitty timing for a nervous breakdown. He is gonna learn to stop being worthless someday. Assuming he doesn’t die first.

Mostly he stays curled on the bed that Lizard fixed, staring at the dried flowers and the broken stuff. Dirt and spiderwebs and shards of glass, and the sun comes in everywhere and reflects at weird angles. The place is kind of nice, that’s what Hughes doesn’t get.

Ed reads, off and on. He works out as much as his body can handle. He buys food every once in a while. He tries not to think about anything, just listens to Al’s voice whispering in the quiet.

Sometimes it’s not so bad, having Al’s shadow in his brain.

Al-voice thinks he should stop running away. Al is almost always right. If he hadn’t died and left Ed alone, maybe he could do something about forcing Ed to listen to him, too.

Eventually Ed gets to the point where he can see that, actually, the Day of Oh My God was pretty freaking funny. All that crap happening on the same day, what’re the odds, right? The gods have it in for Edward Elric.

He doesn’t think he’s keeping track of the time, but apparently he is, because he wakes up one morning and _knows_ they’re down to ten days.

It’s past time to get off his ass and make himself useful. He’s not sick anymore, he’s not crazier than usual, he’s as close to fine as he gets. He’ll go find somebody who deserves a beating, and that’ll make him feel real again. Then he’s gotta find Greed, who’s been MIA for a worryingly long time. Next he’ll check on Hawkeye, and after that he’ll talk to Roy, who’s probably in a tizzy by now. Last and maybe least, he needs to see about his secret weapon dad.

He’s still got a lot to do.

* * *

Greed is unfindable, apparently. Ed looks in all the usual places, but no Greed and no Ling. Instead, there’s an enraged Lan Fan and her equally unhappy granddad.

Turns out Ed shouldn’t have started the day with a fight, cuz he’s coming off being sick, and it might’ve been nice to be fresh when imperial bodyguards attacked him. Too bad about that.

The good news is, Lan Fan doesn’t kill him.

The bad news is, nobody knows where the fuck Greelin is.

“I thought you were following him around,” Ed says once everybody’s calmed down and stopped throwing knives.

“We thought _you_ were working for him,” Granddad says.

Lan Fan just polishes her knife. She’s a straightforward one, nice and easy to understand.

“I am, but he decided I can look out for myself. Greed doesn’t fret about me, yeah? Or about you. As compliments go, it’s a really fucking annoying one. Ling still frets, though, and that’s why this is weird.”

“If the homunculus has somehow killed our prince—”

“No way.” Weren’t they paying attention? “If anything, Ling’s gonna own Greed soon. Greed’s kind of a simple tool, you ask me.” It occurs to Ed that this whole conversation is pointless. “Anyway, if you don’t know and I don’t know, this is a waste of fucking time. He’ll turn up. Can’t mind his own damn business. Soon as there’s a shot at world domination, he’ll be there.” Ed turns to Lan Fan, who’s carrying an arsenal and wearing a freaky mask with black clothes and still isn’t fooling anybody. “He’s fine, okay? Get a grip.”

She chucks the knife at him. He’s fairly sure she misses on purpose, though.

* * *

That exercise in uselessness accomplished, next order of business is Hawkeye. So far, the Hawkeye errand isn’t looking much better than the Greed one.

Ed’s standing just inside the door of the safe house. He’s been there for a while, and hasn’t yet convinced himself that it’d be what you might call a smart idea to get any closer to Hawkeye’s room than this.

Gunshots sound.

“Wah ha ha!” cackles a woman whose voice he doesn’t recognize. “You _suck!_ ”

More gunshots.

“Whoa, shit, Riza.” The strange woman again. “Don’t shoot the messenger! How’re you gonna get better if nobody gives you constructive criticism?”

More gunshots. This has pretty much been the pattern the whole time Ed’s been standing here, which is why he hasn’t moved yet. But he decides he’s being a wuss, and makes himself go to the room. He’s the fucking Demon Alchemist—people are meant to be afraid of _him_.

Besides, he’s for sure not gonna say anything about Hawkeye’s shooting, so there’ll be no reason for her to kill him. Right?

“Edward,” Hawkeye says, shooting him a quick, dismissive glance. “You’re late.” She fires one last shot. Not at Ed, thankfully.

“Didn’t know I was on a schedule,” Ed mutters, sidling over carefully out of the line of fire. The strange woman’s sitting on the other side of Hawkeye’s bed, staring at him with big, interested eyes. She totally looks like the kind of person who’d give Hawkeye crap about her shooting. Which is to say, she looks completely deranged.

Hayate’s sitting at the woman’s feet. He looks up when Ed comes in and thumps his tail against the floor a few times before settling back down and going to sleep. Dogs have it so fucking easy, they don’t even know.

“Cute,” the strange woman decides after she’s given Ed a good once-over. “Which is amazing, considering whatever the hell happened to his face. But too jailbait for me. Who is he?”

“Edward,” Hawkeye says. “Meet Rebecca. Rebecca, leave the room.”

“Give the woman a few helpful comments, she turns into a four-square bitch,” Rebecca mutters, but she jumps up so fast she startles Hayate. “I hope you don’t expect any gratitude, Edward. You’ll be doomed to disappointment.”

“Gratitude?” What the fuck? Ed thinks he’ll be doing well if he gets out of here without bullet holes. _Gratitude_ , shit.

Rebecca pauses and gives him another hard look. He wishes she’d just fuckin’ leave already. He hadn’t been looking forward to this when he thought he was only gonna have to talk to Hawkeye, and instead he’s got Hawkeye plus nosy peanut gallery.

“Riza,” says the peanut gallery, “is this kid broken?”

Hawkeye’s reloading, doesn’t bother to look up. “Compared to whom?”

Rebecca snorts. “Yeah, right,” she says, and finally freaking _goes_.

Hawkeye finishes reloading and aims again. She’s shooting across the room—maybe fifteen feet—at a human-shaped paper target. If she’d been shooting with her good hand, all the bullets’d be going through the same hole in the middle of the target’s head.

Havoc said he once saw Hawkeye shoot at a match with such precision that the bullet scraped the top of the match and lit it. He didn’t actually say he was holding the match at the time, but his panicky face told its own story.

She hasn’t gotten that scary awesome with her off hand. She’s not even trying for the toughest shots; aiming for the chest, not the head. And the pattern isn’t textbook pretty.

Still, you know, any one of those shots would’ve killed the guy.

“You’re secretly not human, right?” Ed says, trying not to sound too impressed or freaked out or anything. “You’re like the Ultimate Gunslinger homunculus or something.”

Hawkeye scowls at him. “This isn’t close to good enough. At this range? I’ll be useless if I can’t do better than this.”

“Uh, okay.” Shit, she _agrees_ with the peanut gallery. “But if you’re seriously pretending you’re human, remember it’s only been like two weeks since everybody thought you were gonna croak. Baby steps.”

“And where have you been all this time?” she asks, glaring at the paper target like it’s a fucking insult. “You promised to watch the Colonel.”

Ed shuffles in place and remembers why he’d thought about hiding out until everybody died and nobody could blame him for anything. “I promised to watch him if you _died_ , not—”

“Go find him.” She’s giving him the gimlet eye, whoa.

“For fuck’s sake. _Fine_ , I’m goin’ already.”

He told himself he’d do anything for her as long as she survived, right? Right. And if what she wants is for him to get away from her when she’s holding a gun and looking like that, hey—that’s okay. He’ll leave the death-defying Hawkeye-taunting to this Rebecca character, who is apparently that kind of weird.

* * *

“Ed!” says Hughes, friendly like he’s never seen Ed lose it and blow shit up ever, let alone recently. “Where have you been?”

“What’s it to you, asshole?” Ed snaps. “I’m here now.”

“So you are, so you are!” Hughes beams and seizes Ed by the shoulders and Ed tries real hard not to freak out and cut him. “Go talk to Roy! Roy’s spent this time so well, Ed, you’ll be proud. He has plans. He has deep thoughts. He needs to talk to you.”

Hughes shoves him across the Dividing Tape (yeah, there’s Dividing Tape in the safe house now), and stands beaming on the other side.

Bastard’s up to something for sure. Ed stares at him, but that smile says _nothing giving_ , so Ed eventually shrugs and wanders off to find Roy. Working Hughes out is never worth the trouble it takes. Odds are he’s on your side, or at least he thinks he is, so it’s best to let him do whatever weird shit he wants and not worry too much about it.

Roy’s hiding in the study. He thinks he’s all sneaky, but when somebody’s hiding, the signs are pretty freaking obvious.

“And what the hell is _your_ problem?” Ed demands.

“Elric,” Roy says, voice sounding kinda like it’s echoing out of the bottom of a well. Roy Mustang: frog in a well. “Where have you been?”

Ed is getting really tired of that question. “I took a lovely vacation to Creta, idiot. Where’d you think I was?”

“Well, I had no idea.” Ed loves how he gets all pissed off like he has a right. “How could I have known? _You might have died_.”

…Oh, so that’s what his problem is. Ed had forgotten what a worrywart Roy was even _before_ the whole Breda and Hawkeye near-death things. He’s sort of out of the habit of having people worry about him. No worries, though; lately everybody seems determined to retrain him.

“Whatever, don’t you give me shit. You know how many people’ve given me shit today? Everybody plus Hawkeye. If you want me not to bail on you, then you need to chill the fuck out. Cuz I can’t take it. I’m like fragile.”

Roy pinches the bridge of his nose and does a laughing-so-I-don’t-cry thing. “Fragile?”

“You bet. Delicate, even.” _Might just snap and kill you all_. Ha ha. “Hughes says you got a plan, you’re gonna save the world, you are his sunshine. Well, you and his wife and kid. Or whatever. What’s that about?”

“I do have a plan. And now that you’ve resurfaced, all we have to do is find your father, and we’ll be able to put it into effect.”

“Don’t wait on him. Goddamn world could end while you’re waiting on him, trust me.”

“But—”

“No, Mustang, I’m fucking serious, here. Don’t wait. He’ll show up if he’s gonna.”

Mustang scowls at him. “All right,” he says, annoyed. “We’ll meet tomorrow at the safe house and discuss our strategy with Lieutenant Hawkeye. If that meets with your approval.”

Haha, yeah. Like as if the whole pack of schemers haven’t worked out absolutely everything and made a dozen backup plans by now. What is this, they want Ed to feel included? Freaks.

“Whatever. You killed Wrath and Pride yet?” Ed’s pretty sure they haven’t. Because if they had, Hughes would’ve bragged about it first thing.

“No,” Roy mutters. Loser. “But we will.” Roy proceeds to go on at length about how they’re gonna do more or less what Ed wanted to do a month ago, only now with a side of political bullshit.

Blah blah blah. The point is, these homunculus bastards are going down.

“And what’re you doing about the human douchebags?” Ed interrupts after freaking ten minutes of blathering.

“I will destroy them,” Roy says, scary all of a sudden. He doesn’t look like himself. Come to think of it, he probably looks like Ed gone cold.

Hawkeye said to keep him from doing anything unforgivable, but Ed’s not sure she has the same standards he does. If Roy wants to go on a lunatic killing spree for great justice, then isn’t Ed the last person in Amestris who can tell him not to?

He’s pretty sure Hawkeye wouldn’t want that. Still, Ed can’t exactly say shit like _Hawkeye wouldn’t want that_ , because if he did, Roy would burn him to death and who could blame him? Maybe he’ll have better luck with _I’ll tell Hawkeye on you_.

Well, whatever. If it gets to be a problem, it’s not like Ed actually has to justify anything. He can just knock Roy down, tie him up, and leave him until he sees reason or at least mellows out. It’s not what Hawkeye would do, but Ed thinks she’ll approve.

“Okay,” Ed agrees.

Roy’s crazy face wavers; he gives Ed a suspicious look. “It must be a bad sign that you, of all people, are agreeing with me.”

Rock. Ed doesn’t have to do anything, he can just hang out and lead by negative example. “Hey, fuck you, Mustang. Maybe I was humoring you cuz you looked like Scar’s understudy.”

“And yet you never humored Scar.”

“Huh. No, I guess I didn’t. I killed him.” Ed does love a well-placed awkward silence. “Maybe it’s kinda different with you, though,” he goes on sympathetically. “I mean, I know _exactly_ how you feel.” Rubbing salt into the wound.

He also happens to know that his sympathetic face is fucking scary these days. Hell yes.

“Would you prefer me to leave the humans to General Armstrong?” Roy asks, trying for snarky, mostly sounding cranky and stressed.

“Sure. She’s no good for the alchemy side, right? But she’s scary as fuck. Those desk jockey assholes’re never gonna know what hit ‘em.”

“I’m going to be very annoyed if I crawl out of the wreckage of the end of the world to find that General Armstrong is the fuhrer. Assuming we survive.”

Ed snorts. “Like Hughes’d let that happen.” And anyway they’re not gonna survive.

“Well,” Roy concedes, “you have a point.”

“I always do. So, right, tomorrow. Hawkeye. ‘Til then, I got shit to do. See ya.”

“Tomorrow.”

Ed runs into Hughes on the way out, obviously, cuz Hughes was lurking and eavesdropping like he always freaking does. It oughtta be way more creepy than it is.

“You, Edward Elric,” he declares, “are a good influence.”

In that leading by negative example way, sure. “You know what, Hughes? Nobody’s ever said that to me before. Like. In my life.”

Hughes pushes up his glasses and acts like he’s serious. “I stand amazed.”

* * *

So that’s that, then. Apocalypse imminent. Countdown begins. The eleventh hour.

Ed’s decided he’s not gonna waste time looking for Hohenheim after all. He’s got this possibly stupid theory that the guy hasn’t wasted his freakishly long life, that he has plans and shit. That he’s implementing those theoretical plans right now. Leave it to ol’ Da, right? Sure, because a guy who can’t do dick for his own family is just the man you want saving the country.

Ed needs to stop fucking thinking about it, cuz it’s way too late for that. And if it’s too late for thinking, then it’s an incredibly bad time to start worrying about everybody he’s ever met, and Lizard and Winry in particular. Especially since they already told him to fuck off because they weren’t leaving. Right?

So why the hell is he brooding about it?

_You miss them, brother_ , Al-voice says.

Yeah, yeah, broken fucking record.

Ed walks past a phone booth and pauses. What he’s thinking about doing is dumb. As in not a good idea. Just because he’s got a phone, a pocket full of change, and a head full of phone numbers he doesn’t remember memorizing does not mean he should put them all together. Half the people on the other ends of those phone numbers hate the thought of him anyway. If they’re gonna hear about the end of the world, they’d rather hear it from anyone else. He should get Hughes to do this.

“Hey,” he inexplicably finds himself saying into the phone. “It’s me.”

“Ed?” asks Winry. “Why are you calling? Are you trying to banish me from the country again?”

“Just checking in, for fuck’s sake. Just—look, Lizard’s okay, right?”

“He’s fine. Checking _in?_ Ed, you’re being weird. What’s wrong with you?”

“…Nothing new.”

“Mhmm. I don’t believe you for a second. By the way, I have made you, Edward Elric, _the most amazing_ arm ever. I’m a genius. Everyone’s jealous. When are you coming to pick it up?”

“If the world doesn’t end—”

“The world had _better_ not end. Do you know how many hours I spent on that automail? Don’t you dare tell me that was a waste of time. In fact, why are you talking to me? Get back to work, Ed.”

Click.

Ed stares at the phone for a while, eventually notices he’s kind of grinning at it. He nods, hangs up, picks the phone back up and dials again.

 

_Hey, it’s me._

_It’s who?_

_Come on, you remember me. I killed your dad that time._

_…How did you get this number?_

_Don’t worry about it, hey, if you ever thought about visiting Xing? Now would be a really great time._

_Wha—I mean—are you threatening—_

_The country’s blowing up or something._

_What!?_

__

 

_Hey, it’s me._

_The…Demon Alchemist?_

_Yeah. So the country’s blowing up._

_Where did you go!? I can’t believe you just left me here, you just_ left, _you, you, you—_

_Okay, sorry, whatever. Country’s blowing up. Focus for a second, shit._

__

 

_Hey, it’s me._

_You. You’re dead to me._

_Yeah, I figured that, but listen…_

__

 

_Xing? But D, why can’t I go to Creta?_

_Wherever, that’s fine. Just not Amestris._

_So I can come back in a month? Exactly?_

_Around a month. I gave you some leeway._

_Less than a month, then? Three weeks? Three weeks and a day? Two days?_

_A month. A fucking_ month, _Sal, why is this so hard?_

__

 

_So you’re paying for this vacation, are you, little Demon?_

_Don’t call me little, fucker, and yeah, if I survive—_

_Which seems deeply improbable. Just how likely is it that I’ll get my money?_

_Not all that likely. But hey, if you wanna stay here and die in a hideous, gruesome—_

_All right, all right. You’re so much trouble._

_You are such a dick. It’s not like I’m asking you to help._

_Perish the thought._

__

 

_Hey, it’s me._

_…Kid._

_If, uh. So I sort of told some people that you’d meet ‘em in Rizembool and take ‘em out of the country with you. That okay? You’re taking Vanessa and them anyway, right? So, y’know, what’s a few more?_

_Does Roy know about this?_

_No. But, I mean, he can. I don’t give a shit. Whatever._

_Where in Rizembool? When?_

_Awesome, so there’s this lady named Pinako, and shit, it scares me how much you’re gonna love her…_

 

Ed carefully hangs up the phone and backs out of the booth, eyes on the dial like it might turn into a snake. He thinks about calling Granny Pinako, but no. This way’s more fun, and besides…

Just no.

Two more steps backward, then he shakes himself and turns to walk down the street, go meet up with Hawkeye and Roy and whoever, get on with the End Times.

That whole phone thing. That was weird. Needed to be done though, right? Right. Turned out pretty okay and everything. Considering.

He’s definitely gonna have nightmares about it. Fuck.

* * *

Apparently all the Civil Unrest wasn’t so much Civil Unrest as it was Roy and Hughes and the general Armstrong scheming their guts out. This means the citizens of Central are even bigger suckers than Ed thought.

Entire city played by Roy Mustang. _Lame_.

That piece of information aside, the chat with Hawkeye was, like Ed expected, basically pointless. All politics and no apocalypse, how is this his problem? And everybody’d made up their minds already, anyway; they just wanted Ed to smile and nod. Right, cuz he’s such a pro at being a yes-man. What the fuck?

Goddamn military, it seriously warps people’s brains. They could just go out and get stuff done, but oh no. Gotta have a fucking _meeting_ first.

So today, two days from the end of the world, they’re having yet another fucking meeting at yet another one of Hughes’s infinite safe houses. This time Hughes swore and promised they’d actually do something afterward, but Ed’s starting to suspect he’s full of shit. People been talking for an hour, nothing’s happened. Ed’s bored.

He doesn’t get this. Didn’t they all agree not to wait for the actual Promised Day, since that’d be stupid? They did. And yet. Fucking talking forever.

And there’re goddamn strangers all over the freakin’ place, whose genius idea was that? What kind of fail conspiracy is it when everybody including the guys you’re overthrowing knows what you’re up to? The hell.

Even the ones who aren’t strangers are kinda…well, frankly, Ed doesn’t like their looks. The weird Rebecca woman’s here with a military crowd, Hawkeye’s granddad passed by, some concerned citizen types with pitchforks and shit are lurking around. They none of them know what the fuck they’re talking about, but they _all_ got somethin’ to say.

At least the Briggs guys are off bashing heads in, so somebody’s doing something smart. Ed almost wishes he were with them. Except they don’t need him, they got it under control. It’s best Ed sticks with the softy patrol here to make sure they don’t call the whole thing off cuz it’s inhumane or whatever.

The Xing girl (Ed did eventually find her), said she’d come, but she hasn’t. Most reasonable thing she’s done for a while; Ed’s still not real clear on what the fuck she thinks she’s doing in Amestris.

People never make any kind of sense, it’s depressing.

Roy’s talking. Something about monsters and justice and the beauty of humanity. Saving the country. Puppies and candy canes. Blah blah blah. People are buying it, too, like the tools they are.

That said, it is fun to watch Roy get his guys all fired up, like a magician’s trick. It doesn’t work on Ed—he’s basically a burnt-out match when it comes to shit like that—but that doesn’t mean he can’t see the art of it. The art of building people up and calming them back down, pulling them out of the hole when they’re at rock bottom. Pretty cool.

Personally, Ed likes to comfort himself with such reflections as _everybody dies_ and _at least I’m still bleeding blood_. He gets that that wouldn’t be so much, you know, _comforting_ for most people. But whatever works.

Bottom line: cool or not, Roy’s inspirational speeches have nothing to do with Ed, so he wanders off. He’s bored. Nobody’s looking his way anyway. He may as well go take down Pride while they’re all blathering. It’ll be _efficient_.

* * *

Problem with that being, first he’s gotta figure out where Pride is. Lucky him, though. He’s got connections.

“Freak. Don’t give alcohol to minors.”

Chris gives him her deeply unimpressed look, which is the one she’s best at. Her and Hawkeye, one as unimpressed as the other. “Did I just catch the Demon Alchemist obeying a law?”

Ed shrugs. “There’s no fun in it if you break _all_ the laws. You gotta break ‘em at random and keep people guessing. Besides, that shit stunts your growth.”

Chris murmurs something that might be, “Well, you can’t afford that,” as she whisks away the drink, but Ed chooses to ignore it for the sake of the peace. Also because when you come right down to it, he’s sort of afraid of Chris.

“How’s my son?” she asks.

“He’s a pain in the ass, is what he is,” Ed tells her. “Was it his upbringing?”

“My, aren’t we burning bridges today?”

Fuck. If she actually came out and _mentioned_ it, then Ed will pay. Not today. Later. When he’s least expecting it.

“Sorry,” he says, knowing it’s not gonna save him.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks.

“Nothing, I’m fantastic, totally enjoying the End Times. What’s wrong with you that you gotta keep asking?” _Damn_ , he’d be better off just cutting his tongue out himself. “Pretend I didn’t say any of that. I got a question.”

She scowls at him, then shrugs and grabs the rag to wipe down glasses like she expects to be bored. Like nothing Ed throws at her is gonna bother her, cuz for sure she’s seen worse. Ed’s always admired her—is there a word for it? That _fuck you, fuck this, fuck everything_ thing she does. Fatalism. There you go.

“I’m looking for the fuhrer’s son,” he says. “Just wondered if you had a clue. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

“You think you can kill a homunculus by yourself?”

She doesn’t have to be so blatantly dubious about it. “Did it before.”

“Hm,” she says, wiping glasses and thunking them down along the bar. Wipe, wipe, thunk. Wipe, wipe, thunk. “You’ve never had it easy, have you, kid?”

Oh, what the fuck is this? Whatever, yeah, life hasn’t been kind to Ed. So what? Ed hasn’t been kind to himself, either. “I’m fine. Mind your own damn business. Do you know where he is or don’t you?”

She thunks down her last glass and rummages under the bar. She’s got fucking everything under there. Wouldn’t surprise Ed if she had a stockpile of Philosopher’s Stones just for the hell of it.

She fishes out a picture of the Pride kid and a map. “Sightings,” she says. “Probably meaningless, though. He used to pretend to be a normal kid, so he was usually at home or school. Who knows where he is now?”

Holy shit. Be prepared, yeah? Spend enough time with Chris, it kind of explains everything that’s wrong with Roy.

Ed looks at the picture, and yeah, he’d recognize this little bastard even if he didn’t know a name to put to him. Something about the blank eyes, maybe. Something about the fake smile, the one that says everybody else’s game isn’t his problem.

For the most part, people are all playing the same game, playing by the same rules. Basic politeness, not pissing in the street, not killing everybody who irritates you, that kinda thing.

Yeah. That’s most people, but there are a few assholes like the ones Ed kills. Like this homunculus kid. Those guys, they say fuck it, they’ll do whatever they want, play their own game by their own rules.

And that’s fine. They can do that.

_Can I play, too?_

Ed grins at Chris. “Hey, thanks.”

“He’ll probably be with the fuhrer’s wife,” she says, watching his face, waiting for something.

Ed taps the picture against the bar and frowns. “She know what he is?”

“I don’t know,” Chris says. “But she loves him.”

“Huh.” Ed tilts the picture to look at the kid’s face again and tries to wrap his mind around that. Homunculus husband. Homunculus son. A woman who actually loves them both. But maybe it’s not so surprising. If Ed’s learned one thing from hunting down scumbags, it’s that most mothers can love just about anything. He’s not sure if that’s creepy or awesome.

It doesn’t stop him from killing anybody, though. “Sucks to be her. You’re leaving town tonight, right?”

Chris scowls. Ed doesn’t know what the hell her problem is now.

* * *

He can’t find the kid. He’s got a picture, he’s got a _fucking map_ , and he still can’t find the kid. That is just plain sad. Embarrassing, too, cuz he’s gonna have to go back to Roy and troops now, and they’ll be like, “Where were you?” and instead of being able to say, “Kicking homunculus ass,” he’s gonna have to say, “Wandering aimlessly around Central pissing people off for no reason.”

Well, no, actually he’s gonna stare belligerently and refuse to answer and feel like a spastic little kid. But if he did answer, the answer would be lame.

By the time he gets back to the house, most everybody’s bailed, except for a little group hanging around in front of the door. Mysterious errands, who knows. And there’s some new guy there, looming over Roy like a man mountain.

“Who’s the freakishly huge guy?” Ed asks Hughes, eyeing said freakishly huge guy. He may actually be bigger than Armstrong. It’s not natural. “Or, I dunno, _what_ is the freakishly huge guy?”

Hughes jumps a foot when Ed starts talking to him, and that’s gratifying, anyway. “Ah. Ed! We wondered where you’d gone off to.”

Ed shrugs and stares belligerently and feels like a spastic little kid. Hughes sighs, but lets it go. “That’s Basque Gran, the Iron Blood Alchemist.”

“Right.” Ed considers him again. This guy would be seriously hard to bring down. Ed’s not sure what those arrays do, but between the general look of them and the title, he figures it involves pointy hunks of metal. Yikes. Best bet would probably be to get behind the guy and go for the eyes.

Gran’s got a scar on his face, too. It’s not as cool as Ed’s. “He’s fucking enormous. How’d Scar miss him?”

“Perhaps Scar was distracted by you,” Hughes says.

“Huh.” Maybe Ed accidentally-indirectly saved this enormous guy’s life. How completely weird. “Okay. You said something was happening after your stupid fucking meeting, and everybody’s gone, so I guess it’s over. Now what?”

“We’re attacking the Father,” Hughes says proudly.

Ah, good. Ed’s not gonna have to charge in there alone and die stupidly, which was his plan if they didn’t do something today. Now he can charge in with a whole bunch of people and they can all die stupidly. Rock. “What’s this _we?_ ”

Hughes pouts. Hughes is _nuts_. “Fine. You and Roy and Gran are attacking the Father. Happy now? Hawkeye and I are going to wait outside and make sure the civilians don’t, ah. Become overly enthusiastic.”

Overly enthusiastic, huh? Ed grins. “Right.”

“Ah, Elric. There you are.” Roy.

“Hey.” Ed nods at Roy, but doesn’t bother acknowledging the huge guy. He’s kind of annoyed they’re taking a stranger. “I hear today’s the big finale. Make or break. Fuhrer or bust.”

Roy disapproves at him. “Catalina and her troops should be downtown by now, helping Briggs attack the capitol building and create a distraction. Once we’re in the lab, Hughes will meet up with my team, and they’ll keep an eye on the outside world.”

“Uh, okay.” Apparently Ed’s gonna get meetinged at no matter what. He wishes they’d stop confusing him with someone who gives a shit.

“What do you plan to do, Elric?”

“Tag along.” Did he seriously fucking ask that question? Because even Hughes knows the answer to it already. Roy seems to forget who found out about all this shit in the first place. Besides, Ed made a deal with Hawkeye. He figures if he keeps Roy alive until the end of the world, she can’t say he didn’t hold up his end. “See the sights.”

“Sounds fun. Can I come, too?”

Ed spins. Shit, he’s slipping, how many people have snuck up on him lately? _Too fucking many_.

And this time it’s Hohenheim. That definitely adds insult to injury.

“You! Where the fuck have _you_ been?” He could ask how Hohenheim found the place, too, but he’s a little worried that Hohenheim’s been keeping track of him. And if he has, Ed doesn’t want to know. Too weird.

Hohenheim’s giving him fretful dad looks. It’s like he’s _trying_ to goad Ed into attacking him. “Are you…feeling better?”

This puzzles Ed for a second, but then he remembers that the last time Hohenheim saw him close up, he was probably like. Pinned down by Armstrong and snarling on the floor or something. And Hohenheim left anyway. “Fuck you,” Ed tells him. “I said where’ve you _been?_ ”

“I’ve been preparing.” Hohenheim smiles like there’s something to smile about.

Ed scowls back, which is irrational, since that’s exactly what he’d hoped the jackass was doing. “Preparing what?”

Hohenheim takes this time to explain that the father guy can short out Amestrian alchemy. Wouldn’t that’ve been nice to know anytime before now?

“So we’re fucked,” Ed says.

“If that happens, I should be able to handle him on my own, but—”

“But obviously you’ve never checked, yeah yeah yeah. How about Xingian alchemy?”

“It should have no effect on—”

“Then we’re taking the Xing girl, if—Hughes. Hughes, you’re a giant fucking stalker, find the Xing girl.”

Hughes raises eyebrows at him, looks all _amused_. Then he points.

Xing girl, twenty feet to the left. So she came after all.

This is like the day of embarrassing.

“Shut up,” Ed tells Hughes, who hasn’t actually said anything. “I’m having a shit day because it’s the end of the world. Cut me some slack.”

Hughes laughs at him. If Ed weren’t so busy with the aforementioned world ending, he might have to pound the crap out of the guy. But duty, you know, it calls.

The Xing girl marches up to him and scowls like the brat she is. He shares his good news anyway cuz he’s magnanimous like that. “I know a guy with a Philosopher’s Stone,” he says. “Wanna come get it?”

“You do have a way with words,” Roy murmurs as the Xing girl folds her arms and scowls harder. Ed ignores him.

“Is it this Father person you told me about?” she demands.

“Right.”

She gazes speculatively around at the gang. “I’ll come,” she decides eventually. Sounding not all that sure about it.

Ed smirks triumphantly at Roy. He can totally talk people into doing stupid shit; Roy doesn’t have a monopoly on it. “Hey, Lan Fan, you’re coming, too, right? Ling’ll probably be there. You gotta wait ‘til after the showdown to kill Mei, though, cuz I need her.”

Lan Fan drops out of the tree where she’s been listening to pretty much this whole conversation and nods. Everybody jumps including Hughes, it’s nice. See? Ed notices stuff. He notices when people are in trees, because trees are the logical place to go, being all high and hidden and with a great view. Why are people always walkin’ around on the ground?

Ed’s not the one who’s crazy.

Anyway, Lan Fan’s been following him for days (she must’ve been totally out of ideas to sink that low), so he knows to check for her.

“Okay, let’s walk and talk. And you.” Ed turns to Hohenheim. “I wanna hear this plan you came up with, cuz it’s still tough to believe you didn’t spend your whole life working fulltime on being a massive asshole.”

“Elric.” Roy’s scolding him. _Roy_ , who should be staying the fuck out of it cuz it’s got nothing to do with him. And besides, he has a weird relationship with his parent, too; he can’t talk.

“Stay the fuck out of it,” Ed tells him. Roy starts to argue, but Hughes plucks at his sleeve and smiles at him, some mystery Hughes smile. Whatever. Point is, it shuts Roy up. Hughes is sometimes useful. And everybody else is minding their own damn business like they’re civilized.

“If my plan works out,” Hohenheim says, “I may have a request for you afterward.”

That is so not an answer to the question. Ed has to remind himself that it’s actually impossible to break this guy’s face. “I don’t owe you shit.”

“Of course you don’t. But it’s a request you may enjoy.”

“A fuckin’ _request?_ Like what, and by the way, in what world do we have time for this?”

“We have a moment. As for the request, if I survive…well. I’ve been alive for a very long time. I understand fixing that problem is your area of expertise.”

Ed blinks for a second, just straight up confused. Then it hits him what his crazy-ass, worthless fucking excuse for a father is asking for, here.

“I’m not gonna kill you as a personal favor, you sick fuck.”

“Don’t call your father those names. And you tried to kill me the first time you met me in Central.”

“That was then, this is now. It was an accident, anyway.”

“Accident?”

“Yeah, remember how I’m batshit? I kind of wander around blowing stuff up and wreaking havoc and killing people in general, no idea _what_ I’m doing half the time.” Ed can hear Roy making choking noises. Bastard. “God, you’re such an asshole. First you’re like, ‘You’d kill your dear old dad?’ all pathetic, and now you’re like, ‘Kill your old dad.’ I mean, what the fuck.”

“I’m reasonably sure this fight will kill me. But if it doesn’t—”

“Yeah, sorry if you’re disappointed, it’ll be tragic. Still not my problem.”

“Hm. We can address that if we come to it. In the meantime….”

Hohenheim shares his plan, if you can call it that. Sounds kinda like one of Ed’s plans, in the way it boils down to _kill everything, hope it works out_. Maybe this proves they’re related.

Or maybe Hohenheim’s holding out. That’s obviously what Roy thinks; he’s got his suspicious-constipated face on.

“Fine,” Ed says to shut Hohenheim up. They’ve made it to the lab now and there’s no point in dicking around outside. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy anyway, so let’s go with it.”

Roy’s staring with his mouth open. _That’s right, jerk, I can read boring-ass military theory books as well as the next guy_. “We gonna kill these guys or what?” Ed asks.

There are three guards outside the lab. Everybody else is probably off trying to keep the general Armstrong from destroying Central (total lost cause there). Only three. That’s easy enough.

“We’re not killing them, Elric,” Roy says all horrified. What must he have been like before Ishbal? Talk about babe in the woods.

“Okay, sunshine,” Ed says. “Are we gonna explain the error of their ways before or after they shoot you in the head, Roy Mustang, AWOL traitor guy?”

At this point, the huge guy steps up, smashes his fists together, and shoots fucking chains across the kill zone, wrapping up the guards like presents.

Ed turns and looks at the guy—properly looks at him, not just threat evaluation—for the first time. “Okay,” he says. “That was actually kind of awesome.”

The huge guy smiles. “Years of practice,” he says.

Ed’s glad Roy brought this Gran character along, after all.

“On that note,” Hughes says, “I am fleeing the scene. Lieutenant Hawkeye and I will come looking for your corpses if you don’t contact us within twenty-four hours.”

“Why bother? If we die, then you’re only gonna be a few hours behind us.”

“Keep smiling, Ed,” Hughes says, backing off with a wave. “Roy, don’t do anything Hawkeye wouldn’t let you do.” He pauses for one moment of seriousness. “Good luck.”

* * *

The lab is creepy as fuck. Ed hadn’t really noticed the first time, being busy chasing down Mustang and crew. He’s not sure why it’s coming as a surprise to him now, because _obviously_ it’s creepy as fuck, right?

Maybe it’s all the pipes. Creepy pipes.

“We’re never going to find him,” the Xing girl says, and Ed would yell at her, except she’s not actually whining. She sounds fuckin’ terrified, and…okay, he gets where she’s coming from. “He’s _everywhere_ ,” she whispers, her cat thing clinging to her shoulder and shaking.

“It’s cool,” Ed tells her. “We got until tomorrow. And then it’ll still be cool, cuz we’ll be dead and won’t care.” Relieved of all cares, like Hawkeye said.

“Ed, please don’t try to comfort anyone in my hearing ever again,” Roy says, compulsively checking six. He’s obviously missing Hawkeye more than Ed misses his arm. Again, Ed would mock, except he’s missing Hawkeye almost that much, too. Why’d the moron have to get herself stabbed in the stomach?

“It would be more efficient if we split up,” Hohenheim announces.

Shoe drops. _This_ is what the bastard was holding back, this is what he was after. So he wants alone time with the father guy, huh?

Well fuck that.

“We got all day,” Ed points out, bracing himself for the bullshit Hohenheim’s gonna use to defend his stupid idea.

Hohenheim turns to Lan Fan, of all random things. “This young lady and I could form one search party, and the rest of you could form the other. You’d have Miss Chang’s alchemy to support you in case—”

“Just you and Lan Fan? No fuckin’ way, dirty old man.”

“Edward, would you deprive me of the pleasure of a lady’s company?”

Ed doesn’t know what Hohenheim thinks sneakin’ away is gonna accomplish, but he doesn’t much care, either. Point is, it’s not happening. “Screw you. Is running out on people hardwired into you, shit-for-brains? We’re not splitting up. We got an entire day to find the guy. When we _do_ find the guy, we’re gonna tackle him all at once, right, because that’s the smart option. As opposed to your plan. If you have one.”

Hohenheim frowns. “Edward, I think I have more years of strategizing behind me than you do.”

“Yeah? I think I got more killing people behind me than you do, so shut the fuck up.”

“I did manage to destroy my entire country out at one point, you know.”

“Uh, no you didn’t. You stood there with your head up your ass while somebody _else_ destroyed your country. Face facts.”

“We’ll stay together,” Roy decrees out of nowhere, wearing his I’m the Alpha face. Ed laughs at his stupid face, but doesn’t argue. Long as he’s gonna be on Ed’s side, Roy can act as alpha as he wants.

Come to think of it, this is how Ed manages to get along with Greelin, too.

Hohenheim sighs and turns back to Lan Fan, whispers something to her. She stares at him incredulously for a second, then takes off. The traitor.

“What was that about?” Ed demands.

“She’s doing a little reconnaissance for me,” Hohenheim says, trying to look trustworthy. Bombing spectacularly. The family face doesn’t do trustworthy, apparently.

Well. Al did it pretty well. He’s dead, though.

“Fine,” Ed says. “But if she gets killed, it’ll be your fault.”

Hohenheim sighs. Roy squirms cuz apparently he can’t handle family drama. The Xing girl and Gran try to act like they aren’t listening. Ed rolls his eyes at all of them and almost wishes Hughes were here. Except that’d get the idiot killed, which is why they didn’t bring him. Right.

They walk.

* * *

Ed’s starting to get seriously depressed about Central. Like, how fucking oblivious can you get? They have a goddamn monster factory in the middle of their city, and they _don’t notice?_ They don’t notice monster factories, they can’t throw a proper riot, the hell are they good for?

Monsters. It’s ridiculous. Five minutes after they walked into the lab, they opened the wrong door and got tackled by a bunch of pissed off chimera. Ed has a funny feeling that this is how the whole lab is gonna go. But at least the chimera weren’t a huge problem—they wiped the poor bastards out so fast, it was almost sad.

Ed had never seen the Xing girl fight before. He understands now how she made it across a desert and through Amestris with no bodyguard. Damn.

After chimeras, they got swarmed with some kind of freaky doll-soldiers. What the fuck those were, Ed neither knows nor cares to know, but they were a bitch to kill. Not as bad as homunculi, but still a sincere pain in the ass. In the end, Roy burned them to ash. Every once in a while, Roy is pretty useful.

So. Chimeras, doll-soldier things, and now this. Central is completely dead to him.

“You’re early,” says this walleyed guy with weird teeth and, like, evil wrinkles. He’s giving out enough waves of creepy to drown the whole city. Ed would’ve tried to kill him right off the bat, but he got sidetracked by the Bradleys, and that gave Roy and Hohenheim a chance to start talking. They’re actually _talking_ to Walleye. Unbelievable.

The Bradleys are even more annoying than the doll-soldiers. Ed didn’t like Bradley Mark I, and now here’s a whole flock of wannabes. They’re tough, not to mention creepy as fuck. Still, between Ed and Gran and Mei, they’re making progress. Or at least, Ed thought they were.

“You’re far too early,” Walleye says, interrupting Roy and Hohenheim’s babble. He grins a slimy, sexual predator’s grin.

An array kicks up, and Ed realizes, way too late, that Walleye is standing in the middle of a circle of five Bradleys. And somehow nobody noticed, which means they all deserve to have their asses kicked, because what kind of fail alchemists are they?

While Ed’s staring at that looming disaster and wondering if there’s anything he can blow up to stop it, a Bradley sneaks up behind him and grabs him. He let someone sneak up behind him, for fuck’s sake, and _grab_ him. He _seriously_ deserves to get his ass kicked.

Which may be what’s about to happen. It feels like he’s getting sucked down into something, or pulled backwards, or who even freaking knows.

Actually, it feels…kinda familiar.

Oh _fuck_.

“We need to keep you occupied for a while,” Walleye says. “Until you can be of use.”

Crackle, flash, a nauseating feeling like being shredded, and the world is gone.

* * *

Or anyway, _that_ world’s gone. But Ed knows this one, too. White space. Big door. Grinning non-person.

Back in this old nightmare again.

Thing is, it’s such an old nightmare, it’s hardly even nightmarish anymore. Mainly it’s familiar. Familiar and annoying. He’s dreamt this so often that his brain eventually did a neat trick and, as far as Ed can tell, totally disassociated the place from what happened here.

So now Ed looks up at the Gate, and even though he _knows_ this is how he killed Al, that’s not what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, _Do you know how much sleep you stole from me, you bastard?_

Reality’s got nothing on his subconscious when it comes to horrifying the shit out of him, anyway.

“Back again, young fool?” the Truth asks, smirking. Wearing Ed’s arm and leg. Ed has a sudden insight into his huge problem with the fuckers who keep trophies.

“Shut up,” Ed says, “I got no idea how I ended up here this time, and I don’t owe you shit.”

The Truth laughs at him. And if that isn’t fucking typical.

Truth’s still laughing when the sick-making shredding feeling starts up again. Ed is really goddamn tired of being jerked around like this.

* * *

When he opens his eyes again—or maybe when he _has_ eyes again—he’s in some weird underground room. He huffs an irritated sigh, sits up, takes stock.

Weird underground room with creepy pipes everywhere and some kind of throne thing, check. That giant Gran guy, check. Hohenheim, on the floor looking almost as annoyed as Ed, check. Teacher…

Hang on, _Teacher?_ “What’re _you_ doing here?” Here, and not looking so great. “Shit, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. What are any of us doing here?” She sits up and looks around. Doesn’t seem to like much of what she sees. “Is that Van Hohenheim?”

“Izumi!” Hohenheim says like they just ran into each other at a freaking garden party. “It’s good to see you doing…well?”

“Likewise. For the moment, anyway.” Teacher shrugs. Too bad she didn’t kick Hohenheim in the face for being stupid. “So what is this place?”

“Lab 3, maybe,” Ed says. “Teacher, did you come through the Gate?”

Izumi frowns, shakes her head. “It felt like the Gate, but I came straight here. Did _you_ go through the Gate?”

“Yeah.” Which is weird. “Yeah, what—?”

It’s tough to have a real conversation, seeing as they have to shout over Gran, who’s rolling around roaring in pain and stuff. He definitely had hands when they walked into the lab, but he doesn’t now, so _he_ must’ve gone through the Gate, paid the price. But why? When? And Ed went through the Gate, too, even though he didn’t transmute anything. How’s that work? Did Walleye transmute the Bradley that was holding him? Did Ed get sucked into the array, too?

What the fuck would be the _point_ of that?

But it looks like that is what happened, cuz there’s Walleye crawling around on the ground behind Teacher, dazed, but otherwise fine. Must’ve had a Philosopher’s Stone stashed somewhere.

They for sure don’t need any more of Walleye’s shit. Ed claps, walks over, and stabs the guy quick in the back of the neck before he has a chance to orient himself.

When he turns away, Hohenheim looks sad and Teacher looks pissed off.

“What?” Ed demands in, hey, a normal voice. Gran’s down to quiet moaning now, which is a relief. “We got bigger problems than that fucker. Get over it.”

Hohenheim shoves his hands in his pockets and stares at the floor. Teacher scowls, but she nods, too, like maybe Ed’s not wrong. She goes to put a hand on Gran’s back and make him shut up.

Of course Ed’s not wrong. They should be building up all the advantages they can while they can, cuz this situation is totally earmarked for going to shit sometime soon. Bearing that in mind, he has a look around the place. Not much here, really, apart from pipes and a throne.

A throne, huh?

He claps and smashes the shit out of the throne. Does it prove anything? Probably not. Does it make him feel better? Kind of.

Makes Teacher feel better, too. She’s smirking at him, now. He smirks back.

Good things never last, obviously.

“One,” says an annoying voice from the dark. “Two, three, and…four.”

A guy steps into the light. He looks just like Hohenheim, only older, and also like way more of a crazy asshole. Ed’s never thought it before, but seeing this guy, he decides Hohenheim has kind of a nice face.

“We’re one short.”

Ah. Five human sacrifices? Must be. So this is the father guy, makes sense. He must want five idiots who opened the Gate; that would explain Ed and Teacher and Hohenheim. And Gran, who—Ed checks—has finally managed to stand up. He looks like hell, but he looks like a fight-to-the-death kind of hell. Ed’s liking him more all the time.

“Dwarf in the flask,” Hohenheim says, surprisingly cool.

“Slave Number 23,” the father guy answers. “You once gave me part of your body. Now you’ll become part of mine.”

Hohenheim laughs, just in case anybody had any doubts about his total weirdness. “Here we are, finally reunited after so many years, and you don’t seem happy to see me,” he chuckles. Man has a real verbal diarrhea problem. He and Ed are gonna have to discuss that (if they survive, which obviously they won’t).

“Don’t _talk_ to him, you stupid asshole,” Ed hisses in Hohenheim’s ear, making him jump. “Just fuckin’ _kill him already_.”

“Edward,” Hohenheim murmurs back, trying to act calm, collected, and like somebody who didn’t jump a foot when his own kid talked to him. “I’d like to understand why he—”

“Oh, fuck why he did it.” Hohenheim is a moron. “Point is, he did. And he’s gonna do worse in a minute. You’re such a tool.”

Hohenheim starts talking again (surprise, surprise), but Ed’s already moving.

There’s a look people get when they’re too far gone. It’s in the eyes, the mouth, the way they move. Something’s snapped, and it shows, okay? It shows bigger than shit, especially in somebody who’s been that way for a thousand damn years or whatever.

Ed gets one good hit in out of sheer surprise, and he tries to make the most of it. He pulls the same trick he did with Gluttony, figures it can’t hurt to see what happens.

What happens is he almost fucking dies.

If breaking down Gluttony’s Stone felt like a river of people screaming through him, then this is a goddamn battering ram tearing him apart. There’s a wall of sound, not individual screams, and sickening pressure in every direction. He can’t even fucking _think_ ; feels like his head’s gonna burst open. He does some screaming of his own.

Then it stops. One second thousands of wailing, shoving people in his head, and the next, nothing. Silence. Ed falls over.

He can see the father guy’s fallen over, too. At least it did _some_ good. Ed rolls a bit to face Teacher, who must’ve dragged him away and saved his ass. Crazy dangerous—what if she’d been sucked in? “Hey,” he croaks. “Thanks.”

She smoothes back his hair, which is very weird. “You’re a lot of trouble, idiot apprentice. Get up. That didn’t finish him off.”

Hah, of course it didn’t. Ed heaves himself to his feet in time to see Hohenheim charge toward the father guy, who’s standing already, not looking anything like as bad as Ed. Fuck.

Teacher charges in after Hohenheim. Gran charges in after Teacher. Ed takes a couple more seconds to breathe, tells himself _fuck it_ , and goes charging in too. He does love a free-for-all. He loves them more, though, when all life in freaking Amestris doesn’t rest on the outcome.

After about ten minutes, Ed’s bloody and dizzy from wacky alchemy and being smashed into walls, Teacher’s bloody and doubled over and looking seriously not good, Gran’s on his feet out of nothing but plain cussedness, and even Hohenheim’s starting to get kinda frayed around the edges.

The father guy, meanwhile, looks annoyed. Otherwise, not too different.

Ed laughs. He’s not sure why. Because everybody’s gonna die, and it’s hilarious? The father guy clearly takes it personally, though. His problem is, he’s got no sense of humor.

“ _Where is he?_ ” he screams. “ _Where’s the fifth?_ ”

Ed laughs more. Regardless of how it turns out, he likes how badly they screwed with the plan. For one thing, they’re a day early, which means father guy’s gonna have to pin everyone down here until doom’s day (goooood fuckin’ luck). For another thing, the moron’s short a sacrifice.

He probably doesn’t want any Xingian alchemists since he can’t short circuit them, so no Mei. He might go for the crying Armstrong, but he’s not conveniently at hand—he’s meant to be watching his feral sister. So that leaves Roy.

Roy, who hasn’t shown up. They are short one weasily, scheming colonel.

Ed’s still grinning about that when the roof caves in and he almost gets knocked out by a chuck of ceiling and a Xing girl. The cat thing lands right on his head. Greed falls down a few feet away, cackles to himself, and immediately jumps up to help Hohenheim.

“Nice timing,” Ed tells Mei, holding a sleeve to the claw-marks on his forehead (thanks, cat thing). “Might’ve been better if you hadn’t almost smashed me flat, but hey, I’m not complaining.”

She clearly doesn’t have time for his shit; she’s too busy staring around all wild and fierce and stuff. Which is fair.

Mei and Greed falling from the ceiling hasn’t made as much of a stir as it should have. Ed kinda hoped Greed would do a number on the father guy, but of course not; father guy zaps Greed every time he gets in range, same as Izumi and Gran. As Ed watches, though, father guy bends backwards and black shit comes stabbing out of his mouth.

What the hell’d they do to make that happen? Eurgh. Still, gotta be a good thing, right?

Wrong. Shit, it’s the opposite of good. The stabby things are forming into a small, kinda human-shaped mass of black and eyeballs. It’s like a snake shedding its skin.

And as if that’s not fucked up enough, Ed spots the elusive Pride hanging out in the shadows in the corner of the room. He must’ve fallen down when Mei and Greed did. It freaks Ed out that he didn’t notice before.

Pride looks just like his pictures, which is to say, he looks like a little bastard who doesn’t deserve to live. He’s watching the fight with a bored expression that says he’s not worried about the outcome. Pisses Ed off.

“The kid’s a homunculus,” he shouts to Izumi and Gran, pointing helpfully. They don’t hesitate at all, just attack as soon as Ed shouts. This working with people thing isn’t so bad. Maybe people have a point about that.

Although Gran’s doing alchemy by smashing his stumps together, which is disturbing to watch. And Ed feels kinda responsible for it. Downsides to teamwork.

The father guy’s freaking chatting with Hohenheim again. Something about how he’s gonna become a god or swallow god or blah blah. It’s the kind of thing that’s only cute when Greed says it. Ed decides this is a good time to try to smash in an eyeball with a rock.

For once, Ed’s rock makes contact instead of getting zapped, but it doesn’t seem to do anything except irritate the guy. A few eyes turn toward Ed, then a black, eyebally hand touches the ground, and this wave of _something_ slams out like a thunderclap.

Izumi growls and Gran bellows. Ed claps and, ignoring the horrible sinking feeling, touches the ground.

Nothing happens. This is what Hohenheim was talking about, then.

“Alchemy’s broken,” Ed tells Mei, who’s been hanging out all this time watching them fuck up, apparently too angry and confused to join in. She snaps out of it to shoot Ed a pitying glance, then draws a circle and transmutes a rock into the shape of his head. Although he likes to think he doesn’t actually look that stupid.

“I never liked you,” he tells her. He feels she should know this before they die. She rolls her eyes, says, “Unbelievably rude,” and sends the Ed-rock flying toward the father guy. It hits him in the face. It’s gratifying how much the bastard didn’t see that coming.

But he’s sure as shit noticed them now.

“Get close to me!” Mei shouts. Everybody obeys except Greed, which strikes Ed as weird. Shouldn’t there be more disobedience? From him, at least? Well, any port in a storm, maybe. Mei draws a circle, puts her hands down—

Father guy tries to attack, but he can’t get through Mei’s circle. That, Ed has to admit, is awfully useful.

Well, in a way. In another way, Hohenheim is now fighting the bad guy while everybody else hides behind him and a little girl, and Greed makes pointless sneak-attacks that never work. It’s shameful. Happily, Pride fixes that problem.

He can’t get in the circle, his freaky shadows can’t get in the circle (Ed is not about the freaky shadows, that is so fucked up), but he can stand outside the circle and throw rocks in, just like the brat kid he looks like he should be.

It’s not serious, Ed tells himself, just annoying. And anyway, Ed’s got his back to Hohenheim, propping the guy up. What if he left and Hohenheim fell down and the world ended? Wouldn’t he feel like a jackass then?

Pride throws a rock that just misses Teacher’s eye, and Ed’s good sense takes a walk.

“Hey, Gran!” he shouts over the scream of apocalyptic alchemy. “Get over here and hold this guy up!” This way Hohenheim won’t fall over, and Gran can stop fucking smashing his stumps together. Genius.

Gran obliges, and Ed charges out of the circle with Teacher right behind him. Kid doesn’t have a prayer against both of them, especially not when he’s gonna try to be gentle and they sure as shit are not. (It’s good to be a sacrifice.) Even the worse for wear, the Demon Alchemist and Izumi Curtis don’t need alchemy to beat the crap out of somebody.

They pass him back and forth for a while, fight going about the way Ed thought it would. Kid cuts them up with those shadow things, sure, but there’s no real doubt about how this is gonna end. It’s actually kinda fun, fighting with Teacher.

Or it would be, if Ed hadn’t noticed the father guy taking off for the hole in the ceiling, Hohenheim and Greed chasing after him. That’s troubling. Sucks the joy out of things.

“Typical humans,” Pride gasps, fending off Ed, ignoring the way his dad just ditched him. “So unspeakably stupid. Don’t you see that there’s no greater use for you than this? Why won’t you let us make something of your lives?”

Teacher’s royally pissed, and the last thing she wants is some snot-nosed homunculus giving her lip. Ed could’ve told him that. Too late now, though: she’s already grabbed him by the neck and flung him into a wall. A structurally unsound wall. Pride hits it pretty hard, and then half of it lands on top of him when it collapses.

On top of him and also Ed. Ed thinks, watching these enormous chunks of wall come falling toward him, that this is where teamwork flat-out sucks.

Al-voice screams his name. It’s the last thing he hears for a while.

* * *

_Brother. Brother. Brother_.

“It would be easier to transmute the rocks.”

“He’s pretty sturdy. Pull harder.”

_Brother, wake up_.

“I don’t think that will work, Ling Yao.”

“You make it sound like my name tastes bad. How do you do that?”

_Brother!_

_I’m awake, Al, for fuck’s sake. Shut up._

“If you dislocate his shoulder, I will have to fix it, so please let me…”

Ed thinks, _Fuck you, Xing girl, I’ll fix it myself_. Then he remembers he promised Roy he wouldn’t pull that shit anymore. Then he thinks Roy never showed up and is probably dead anyway, so what difference does it make?

This is about the time he realizes he actually _is_ awake.

“Fuck you,” he rasps out, trying to squirm away from—Ling?—whoever it is that’s yanking on his arm. The flesh one, not the metal one. There’s shitty luck for you. “Are you _trying_ to rip my arm out of its socket?”

“Please stand back, Ling Yao,” Mei says.

Ling’s right, she does make it sound like the name tastes bad. That’s some talent.

Now that Ed’s awake and able to complain for himself, they don’t take too long to get him free. Mei transmutes the rocks out of the way, and they drag him out. Thanks, Ling, for not letting that happen before.

Only thing that saved Ed from being squashed flat was the transmuted wall he was next to—Teacher’d been using it as a shield at one point. The big wall chunks fell against Ed’s transmuted wall, tipped sideways, and made a little triangle of space for him to not die in. Just another near-death experience thanks to Teacher, no big thing. He isn’t even all that beat up, apart from the initial knock on the head.

Which, yeah, may yet turn out bad. Whatever, it’s a good sign he woke up, and he’s clinging to that thought.

Mei’s staring at him. “Thanks for finding me, I guess,” he tells her, trying to be nice about it. He does owe her big time. She keeps staring. “Probably would’ve died, so. Yeah.” _Still staring_. “Okay, _what?_ ”

“Did they win?” she asks.

“You just pulled me out from under a fucking pile of rocks,” Ed reminds her. “And you’re asking _me_ if they won.”

She scowls. “Well, did they?”

“They did,” says Ling, who’s wandering around the wreckage and the bodies of random Bradleys who must’ve fallen down here, looking all kinds of punch drunk. “If they’d lost, we wouldn’t be alone. We’d have Father keeping us company, assuming we were alive at all.”

“There you go,” Ed tells Mei. Who’s ignoring him now, cuz she’s busy looking for a way to climb out. She spends a lot of time ignoring him. In fact. “What’re you doing down here anyway?” Ed aims the question at Ling as the more friendly ear in the room, arm-yanking or no. “Thought I saw you and Greed go climbing out.”

“And we were thrown right back down.”

“Yeah? And Greed let you take over?”

Ling pauses, considers one of the bodies, turns it gently over with his foot. He leans down and starts rummaging through the pockets. Ed wonders about this guy sometimes, seriously. “Greed is gone,” he says.

Riiiight.

Ed’s spent a lot of time watching Roy, who is one sneaky bastard, and he knows the signs of sneaky bastards who aren’t on the level. It’s possible that Ling’s really cut up about Greed and is trying to hide it. It’s possible. But Ed suspects that actually Greed’s not as gone as Ling’s going to want, say, Lan Fan and the nation of Xing to think.

This is so very much not Ed’s problem that there may not be a word strong enough to express how extremely not his problem it is. He’s asking nothing.

He likes to think Greed’s still around, though. Greed was fun.

“Whatever,” Ed decides. “So you got pitched down here Greedless, and yet somehow you’re fine?”

“Mei Chang did me the honor of healing the worst of my injuries,” Ling says, randomly formal.

Ed whirls to face the Xing girl. “You saved his _life?_ ” This girl? She is un-fucking-believable. “I thought you wanted him _dead_. I’m kind of a pro in this area, and listen, if you want somebody dead, it’s a good idea _not_ to save their lives. Fucking what is _wrong_ with you?”

“Actually,” Ling murmurs, “it was a brilliant move on her part. I’ll defend her clan with my life, now.”

“Whatever your life’s worth, idiot,” Ed snaps at him. “You get possessed, you get tossed into pits, you think you can cut it as an emperor? Bet me.”

Ling gives Ed a woozy grin. “Oh, I will. Name your terms.” And he proudly holds up a bottle of red stuff.

“Oh, shit. Is that a fucking Philosopher’s Stone?” It totally is a fucking Philosopher’s Stone. “Where the hell did you get that?”

Ling gestures vaguely toward one of the corpses. The one whose pockets he was rummaging through. Ed squints and tries to make out some features under the blood.

Oh, yeah. Walleye. So did he have a whole stash of Philosopher’s Stones, or did he just not use up his one?

“That was my kill, asshole.”

Ling stops smiling and stares wild-eyed at Ed, as dangerously uncontrolled as Ed’s ever seen him. “ _You owe me, alchemist_.”

Ed grins. He loves it when people flip out; it’s like they have common ground or something. “Yeah. Guess I do.” He gives Ling and Mei a second to be really confused before he throws in, “Like I’d want one of those creepy-ass things anyway. What the hell’d I do with it? Fuck that. Essence of dead people: it’s all yours.”

Ling relaxes all at once, sinking down on some debris, eyes closed. Been kind of a long day for him, too, huh? “I’m going to find Lan Fan,” he says eventually. “Aren’t you worried about your people?”

‘His people.’ Shit, Ed doesn’t even wanna know. If they’re dead, they’re _dead_ , nothing he can do about it. If they’re alive, they’re gonna want to fuss over him and fix him and shit. He doesn’t need the aggravation.

Plus, if he never knows for sure, he can assume they’re alive. Right?

_Coward_.

Al-voice never pulls punches. Ed sighs, claps, and touches his hands to the ground.

Nothing happens.

Well, that’s that question answered.

In view of fucking broken alchemy, Ed has to climb up to the floor above the hard way. He notices he’s really sore and bleeding all over the damn place (still no maggots), and not only is he not allowed to fix it, he _can’t_. Shit.

“Don’t worry about us!” Ling calls after him. “I’m sure we’ll be fine! We’ll just make our own way out!”

“You have the only alchemist in Amestris who isn’t worthless standing next to you, dipshit. Shut the fuck up, don’t bother me.”

Ed hoists himself onto the upper floor really carefully, cuz it’d be just his fuckin’ luck for the edge to collapse and pitch him back down, thereby crushing Ling.

But no. It holds. He edges along on his belly for a while, then stands and starts walking. He hopes that didn’t wear out all his good luck.

* * *

First body he comes across that he cares about is Hawkeye’s. He almost has a fuckin’ heart attack before he figures out she’s just unconscious, not dead. Which is cool as far as it goes, but there’re a lot of questions Ed might ask her if she were conscious. Things like, _What the fuck are you doing here?_ and, _Didn’t you say twenty-four hours, you lying asshole?_ and also, _Are you_ trying _to get yourself killed? Tell me now so I can stop giving a shit about you_.

She’s out, though. He’s gonna have to save those questions up. Maybe add a few more. In the meantime, he checks around to see if he can work out how she ended up like this. Who did this to her.

He almost steps on the little baby thing a few feet away. It’s like the size of a bean, weirdly cute. There’s a funny round gem or something right in the middle of its widdle forehead. Ed’s got no fuckin’ clue what it is, but there’s nothing else close by to explain what knocked out Hawkeye. So was she protecting the bean, or did she beat the crap out of some homunculus ‘til it turned _into_ a bean?

Ed makes an experimental cut down the thing’s back with one of the metal scraps on the floor. The cut bleeds for a second, then seals up and heals like it was never there.

Homunculus, then. Must be Pride: Ed seriously doubts that any force on earth, even Hawkeye, could ever make Wrath look like this. Kid must’ve sliced Hawkeye up with shadows, then bashed her all over the room ‘til he knocked her out. Nice. He didn’t kill her, and she clearly got her own back, but that doesn’t mean Ed feels like giving him a chance to try again.

He knows this thing has a mother who’ll miss him. He knows.

Everybody’s got people they miss, that’s life.

He kills the thing. It dissolves into dust, the way they do. Sad to watch, maybe just cuz it was so small.

He is actually feeling bad about killing a homunculus. Fucking Hughes broke his brain. He stands abruptly and turns to Hawkeye. _Focus on the living, idiot_.

Hawkeye’s not looking like she’ll wake up any time soon, and he doesn’t want to drag her ass around this maze looking for an exit—that might kill her. Which means he’s gonna have to leave her here.

Why does the best option have to suck so much of the time?

But whether it sucks or not, it _is_ the best option, so Ed drags Hawkeye into a corner and throws his coat over her. With the coat over her face like that, she looks like a lump of trash or a corpse. Nobody should bother her, why would they? Ed nods, satisfied, and takes off to find Hughes, who’s definitely here if Hawkeye is. Hughes can take care of her. Put that busybody impulse to good use.

Ed ends up wandering for a while, and it’d be interesting if he weren’t on the clock. Rooms with weird arrays, trashed labs, dead chimeras. Whole libraries full of what’re probably really bad ideas. A huge room with broken doors, an array on the floor, and a second storey balcony. Ed looks up.

That is totally Hughes clinging to the rail and staring down at him with a _knife_ in his _teeth_. This is Hughes all over. Goofball, goofball, homicidal maniac, goofball. You never know where you stand with the guy.

Nice to have him on your side, though. Nice he’s not dead.

God, him and Hawkeye. Twenty-four hours, huh? Yeah right. Ed’s gonna beat the shit out of everybody just as soon as he works up the energy.

Hughes pushes back from the rail and pulls the knife out of his mouth, which is too bad, cuz it means he’s gonna talk. “Ed,” he says. “There you are. I was afraid I was going to have to go digging for you.”

Ed rolls his eyes. He was starting to suspect that not even death could save him from Hughes, and check it out. He was right.

* * *

Hughes leads him two rooms over and up a level, which is apparently where Roy is. Hey, Roy’s alive, their survival stats are awesome. Apparently Roy and Lan Fan didn’t make it to the fight with the father guy cuz they were busy up above, making friends with Kael and taking down Wrath.

Which, Ed guesses, is good to know, but he wishes Hughes’d shut the fuck up for a second. He’s talking so fast Ed can’t get a word in about Hawkeye. It’s just starting to really piss him off when Hughes abruptly stops talking and waves him into the room where Roy is.

Roy’s standing over a body.

Well, not quite a body. A soon-to-be-body, though. Hohenheim. And in all the shit Hughes said, he couldn’t have mentioned this?

Fuckin’ Hughes. He wants some sappy deathbed scene, guaranteed. He’d probably freak if Ed tried to walk away, but where’s the point in talking to somebody who’s practically a corpse?

Ed does want to know for sure that the father guy’s dead, though, and this is the easiest way to find out. He trudges over to almost-dead Hohenheim. This is gonna suck. “Hey.”

Hohenheim turns quick as he can to face Ed. Quick as he can isn’t all that quick at this point. It’s depressing.

“You nail that father guy?” Ed asks. Keeping on track.

Hohenheim smiles, puzzled. “Yes. Didn’t you notice?”

“I was under a fuckin’ pile of rock, thanks for your concern,” Ed tells him. “You really are a shitty excuse for a father.”

Hohenheim keeps smiling. Well, he did take a lot of hits to the head. “When your children complain about your parenting, you can tell them about me. They’ll count their blessings.”

It’s not real promising that Ed hears _your children_ and instantly thinks _broken bottle shoved up_ —but hell. If the idea of Ed having kids makes Hohenheim feel better, fine. He’s dying. If Ed’s ever gonna throw him a bone, better be now. “Whatever, old man, I’m telling ‘em I hatched from an egg.”

Hohenheim manages to laugh a little, give the guy credit. “Well, that should be easy enough to believe.”

“Shut up, bastard, you weren’t even around to raise me wrong. You don’t get to give me crap.”

Hohenheim laughs again, but he’s kinda breathless. “That’s fair.”

“So how’d you take him down?”

“Hm. In the end, the people who made up his Philosopher’s Stone weren’t on his side, but mine were on my side. He ran out of the time he needed to tip the balance in his favor. I owe a great deal to Greed. And to you, of course.” Still smiling at Ed, like he’s trying to make up for ten years’ worth of smiles right now. “It would have been a mistake to take him on alone. Thank you.” He trails off and goes quiet. Ed thinks he’s gonna leave it like that, but no. One last thing. “I’ll say hello to Trisha and Alphonse for you.”

And _then_ the bastard dies.

“Nice parting shot,” Ed whispers. _Fucker_. If the dead really do wait on the other side of the Gate, then Ed’s gonna have some kind of welcoming committee. He probably won’t even make it to his family. Be torn to pieces before that.

Family of four, three of ‘em dead, and the last one’s…well, the last one’s Ed. Bad luck, that’s all. Bad luck family. Just goes that way sometimes.

Of course Ed’s not having any fucking kids.

He reaches out and closes Hohenheim’s eyes. What’s with this dying like a normal person? Ed was expecting him to break down to dust and nothing. Being a Philosopher’s Stone.

_At least I didn’t have to kill him_.

Al-voice is crying.

“Are you all right?” Hughes asks, quiet.

People really, really need to stop asking Ed that question.

“I barely knew the guy,” he says. It’s hard to push the words out, like his throat’s decided to choke itself. Idiot body. Idiot Hughes. “Hey, Mustang,” he goes on before Hughes can think up any more good, lacerating questions. “Burn him for me.”

“Burn…?” Roy looks baffled by this request, even though, thanks, it’s a totally fucking normal one. Cremation. It’s a done thing. Ed maybe didn’t much like his worthless dad, but that doesn’t mean he wants the guy to be maggot food.

“Ed, are you sure you want—”

“I said _burn him_.”

Roy stares with no expression in those blackout eyes of his. Ed scowls back, cuz this is fair. This is _fair_ , he can ask for this. He has the right.

“If you wait until we get to a proper crematorium,” Roy says finally, never looking away, “then you can collect the ashes. Wouldn’t you prefer that?”

No. No, because what the fuck is he gonna do with dead father ashes? Dump ‘em somewhere? _Where?_ Where d’you dump a guy who was always running away?

But obviously Roy’d prefer it, which is fuckin’ weird, people are weird about death. And Ed’s no better. Why’s he even care if Hohenheim’s body gets maggoty? Not like anybody’s in there anymore. But he does care. What is that, some kind of biological programming?

“Fine. But _you_ burn him. And you better not leave bones, cuz I am not dealing with old man bone chunks, Mustang.”

“I can do that,” Roy agrees. They study each other for a while. Ed turned to this guy to take care of his worthless dad without hardly thinking about it. Now that he _is_ thinking about it, that seems weird. Hohenheim wasn’t anything to Roy. So why?

Weird.

Eventually Roy sighs and turns away. “Let’s find the Lieutenant before she shoots someone on principle,” he says.

“Shit, _Hawkeye!_ ” Distracting Ed with dying fathers, cheap trick. “Doubt she’s even come to yet.” They ought to haul her ass to a hospital and tie her to a bed, Knox-style.

“What do you mean, _come to?_ ” Roy’s freaking out. He’s so high-strung.

“We’d better go find out, hmm?” Hughes gives Roy a significant look that means nothing to Ed, then throws his jacket over Ed’s shoulders and wanders into the maze of the lab, calling out Hawkeye’s name. Roy follows him.

What’s that about? Does Hughes think Ed’s cold or something? What the _fuck?_

Ed finds himself clutching the jacket closer, which pisses him off more. But he trails after the two of them anyway.

They leave the body behind.

* * *

They find Hawkeye; she’s fine. She’s even awake. Apparently dumping her in a corner and leaving her was a great idea, health-wise.

“Do you ever wash this coat?” she asks with what sounds like polite curiosity, but isn’t.

“Well, you bled all over it, so I’m gonna have to wash it now,” Ed tells her. “And fuck off, by the way. Should’ve let you freeze. Ingrate.”

She makes a scary face at Ed. He bares his teeth back at her. Sometime soon, they’re gonna have a talk, just the two of them, about injured people who make lying promises not to sneak into dangerous labs and do stupid shit.

“Lieutenant,” Roy says. “You and Hughes agreed to wait twenty-four hours before coming here.”

Ed horrifies himself by thinking, _Yeah, what he said_.

She turns to Roy with her very blankest face. “Yes, sir,” she answers, that special style of _yes, sir_ that actually means _fuck you_.

“And yet you seem to be rather early.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why is that, Lieutenant?”

She blinks at him. “I’m glad you’re alive, sir.”

“Thank you. I’m glad you’re alive, too. But if—”

“If I hadn’t come, you might not be alive. Sir.”

Roy shakes his head and makes a little touché gesture. Hughes is grinning like a mad fool, maybe cuz he is a mad fool. And Ed…

Ed needs to learn all of Hawkeye’s tricks, because they _rock_.

“Can you stand?” Roy asks.

“I should be fine once I’m on my feet.” She holds out an imperious, bloody hand. Roy pulls her up, guides her arm over his shoulder, puts an arm around her waist. “I will find out why you came here,” he says.

She says, “I’m sure you will, sir.”

* * *

They walk out of the ruins of Lab 3 and run into Teacher and Sig, who’re apparently also still alive. That’s a surprise and a relief. Teacher actually hugs Ed, it’s freaky. Mei’s here, too, hovering over the Gran guy. And Ling’s here; he’s getting bitched out by Lan Fan. No sign of her granddad, though.

It looks like Gran’s dead. Too bad. Ed liked him.

A bit further on, there are a bunch of random military types. Both Armstrongs, looking beat to hell, and the Briggs guys. Plus Havoc in a wheelchair and Breda with a cane, deeply full of themselves for some reason. Then there are a flock of fierce-looking civilians. Every frigging one of them seems to know more about what went down than Ed does. Wild congratulations on all sides, whatever. Lots of shouting.

Roy and Hughes shove Ed between them so he won’t get molested by strangers. If he didn’t know they were doing it to keep him from killing people, he’d be sort of touched.

They’re almost to the middle of the crowd when the light goes weird. Ed squints up and watches for a second as the moon blacks out the sun.

He does some quick calculating. Unless he spent more than ten hours under a pile of rock, there is no fucking way that makes any sense.

* * *

Apparently Hughes and Hawkeye waited almost eighteen hours to come back to the lab. Roy was irritated about them being six hours early, but that’s nothing to how early Ed thought they were. This explains why everybody who wasn’t a sacrifice looked so fucking exhausted—they’d been fighting for a whole day.

Fourteen extra hours, give or take. Teacher decides Ed and Gran and Hohenheim must’ve spent those hours in the Gate, cuz it’s the only difference she and Ed can come up with. Impossible hypothesis to test, obviously. Gran definitely opened the Gate, but they can’t exactly check with Hohenheim.

Assuming they’re right, though, it means time can pass differently inside the Gate if the Gate freaking feels like it.

Ed loved Amestrian alchemy, he really did. He’s gonna miss it like crazy. Even so, he’s kind of glad everybody’s gonna be forced to love Xingian alchemy instead, cuz when you come right down to it, Amestrian alchemy was some scary shit.

So that’s the abuse of alchemy problem solved: alchemy’s broken. And Xing’s purification arts are meant to be about love and peace and healing, so Ed likes to think it’ll be a couple years before Amestrians manage to fuck them up. (He’s trying not to remember Mei Chang on the warpath.) Now the only problem is goddamn politics, and Ed, for the most part, doesn’t care.

He’d vaguely wondered what Hughes was getting up to while everybody else was living, eating, and breathing alchemy. Now he knows, because they crawl out of that hellish lab, Ed blinks, and Roy’s the fucking fuhrer.

Ed’s never gonna bitch about the scheming again. He can’t wait for Chris to get back. She’s gonna laugh her ass off about this, and he wants to see it.

The worrying thing is, Hughes is obviously not done yet. Hughes may never be done. Scheming may be to him what alchemy is to Ed. Or what killing people is to Ed. Either way it’s scary.

Ed follows the upheaval from a safe distance, which isn’t hard: politics is all anybody’s talking about. Inevitable side-effect of a coup. Ed takes a quick trip to Rizembool to dump worthless father ashes next to his mom’s grave (he wants to see the fucker run away from her now), and it seems like every train stop on the way back brings a wave of new gossip.

Ling and Lan Fan and Mei went back to Xing, where Ling instantly finagled his way into being emperor (Ed suspects assassination). Now suddenly Xing’s super-friendly with Amestris for the first time in living memory.

Roy’s busy doing nice things for Ishbal—Ed heard as much from some scowling Ishbalans who were waiting for the axe to fall. Ed found himself in opposites world: _he_ was the guy telling people they didn’t need to be paranoid. Meanwhile, a lot of non-Ishbalans are freaking out. They say the evil Ishbalans are invading the country or whatever, like it wasn’t their country to begin with. People are assholes.

The general Armstrong’s second, that guy Miles, he’s the liaison between Roy and the Ishbalans. That’s cool. Ed hears he’s randomly collected a troop of chimera guys, like bodyguards or who knows. Apparently they follow him everywhere and it’s hilarious. Ed’s gotta see this in action sometime.

Mrs. Wrath is overhauling the entire adoption/orphanage/foster care system in Amestris. Whenever anyone complains to her about the money she’s spending, she says, “Your fuhrer killed my husband.” And she gets her damn money.

Tough lady. Ed wonders if she’s doing all this cuz she’s still looking for her kid.

And finally there’s the local stuff. Knox is working in his son’s clinic like a real doctor. Hawkeye’s signing up for some military shooting contest that she’s totally gonna win with her off hand because she’s _not human_. (And thinking of that, Ed buys her a freaking mirror to replace her old one and has it shipped. He figures it should keep her from hunting him down.) Havoc and Breda are making a fortune as contractors specializing in weapons R &D. They like to pretend they’re not still Roy’s lapdogs, but Ed knows the truth. And he hopes to God they never meet Winry.

Ed’s been following the gossip, yeah. But he hasn’t been involved, and he likes it that way. When the world was ending, he was pretty confident he couldn’t make it any worse. The world’s not ending anymore. There is once again plenty he can fuck up if he lets himself. He’s done.

He was living in some kind of dream world if he honestly thought he could get away with that. Hughes catches up with him about a month after Roy goes fuhrer.

“Edward Elric,” he says. “Just the man I’ve been looking for!” He must’ve been looking hard, too, cuz Ed’s been avoiding him like a leper.

The thing is, Hughes’s been so crazy busy that Ed thought he’d be safe for a while. Hughes is the one managing Roy and the newspapers and the ambitious types. Like, he set up everybody who wanted to be fuhrer with jobs so awesome they don’t want to be fuhrer anymore. He put the general Armstrong in charge of the entire border, which was evil genius.

But you apparently can’t keep Hughes busy enough. He chased Ed to ground in a shitty restaurant on the outskirts of town where nobody knows any Demon Alchemist (not personally, anyway) and Ed has to pay for his own food, which sucks. And it didn’t even help. Nowhere’s safe.

The problem is, Hughes knows everybody, and what’s more, everybody likes him. They fall all over themselves to do him favors. Probably he just had to stand in a bar and say, “Gosh, I wonder where the Demon Alchemist is these days,” and bam, everybody in Central turned into a freaking Hughesian spy.

Ed thinks idly about setting fire to something to put this conversation off for a while.

“Now, now, don’t look at me like you’re daydreaming about the color of my blood,” Hughes says, which obviously causes Ed to do just that. “I’m doing you a favor. Do you know how many phone calls I’ve gotten from Winry Rockbell?”

Ed looks away. Winry’s one of a long list of people he should’ve called after whatever. He didn’t call anybody, though, and it’s clearly coming to bite him in the ass.

“She was threatening to come look for you herself if I didn’t find you.”

Right. Ed shoves his chair back from the table. Screw setting fires, he’s running the fuck away.

No, _shit_ , that never works with Hughes.

“I’ve been thinking,” Hughes says, predictably not put off by anything Ed does, “that your mistake is in your life philosophy. You’ve been guilty of narrow thinking, Ed.”

“I’ve never known what the hell you’re talkin’ about,” Ed rasps out, preoccupied with Winry and how fucking pissed she’s gonna be once she catches up with him. “Not once, not in the whole damn time I’ve known you.”

“What I mean is,” Hughes goes on, “you seem to have a gift for saving entire countries. Maybe individual people are too small. Although you’ve done pretty well with Hawkeye.”

Ed’s mind goes perfectly blank, like somebody dumped a bucket of white paint over everything in there.

Hughes thinks he’s good at saving people.

Hughes is _insane_.

“I have a suggestion!” Hughes beams. Ed should feel the chill of foreboding, but he’s too busy reeling from the last deranged comment. “You can be the new fuhrer’s bodyguard. Because, you see, the fuhrer is the state. In a sense. And you helped save the state once before. It makes perfect sense.”

“… _Out of your fucking mind_.”

“Hawkeye’s with me!”

“So what!? So you’re both out of your fucking minds! Fuck off, Hughes, I kill people. _You know that’s all I do_. And screw you anyway, I’m busy, I’m—”

“What are you busy doing, Ed?” Hughes asks, abruptly deathly serious, leaning forward across the table. “What are your plans? Back to Demon Alchemist duty? I don’t think you’ll find it very satisfying.”

Ed laughs, tries to ignore how cracked and shaky it sounds. “Yeah, well. Everything’s a letdown after the end of the world. I was thinking alchemy; it needs some help. The great swap to purification arts, yeah?” That’s what Teacher’s been up to, learning the purification arts.

Turns out to be a good thing the military was so stingy with its alchemists. Independent alchemists are pretty thin on the ground, and State Alchemists got hoarded like crown jewels, so the economy never depended on them. If it had, the father guy might as well’ve leveled the country, cuz it’d turn out the same.

Even so, it’d be _nice_ to have alchemy back. And Ed would, you know, like to be in on that.

Hughes is grinning. Ed looks at that goddamn grin, and he _knows_ , no avoiding it, that they might as well slap him in a cage right now, because he’s never gonna be free of this man. Roy and Hawkeye might let him go (maybe) if they believed that was what he wanted. Winry he might be able to avoid. Teacher doesn’t ever go looking for people, they can just fucking come to her.

Hughes, though? He’ll never give up, he can find Ed anywhere, and he doesn’t give a flying fuck what it is Ed thinks he wants.

Ed twitches and drops his fork before he’s tempted to use it on Hughes.

“Ed, the job I’m offering you will be very exciting, and you’ll have plenty of private time to study alchemy. Travel, books, adventure! You won’t regret it.”

He’s regretting it already. “Do I get a pension?”

* * *

Ed’s bored.

Ed is really, really fucking bored.

If he’d known that saving Amestris would turn out this goddamn boring, he would’ve let the place burn. Travel and adventure, his ass. He should dismember Hughes, the shithead. And he’d like to see what the crime stats look like now that he doesn’t have time to keep people in line cuz he’s too fuckin’ busy babysitting Roy.

Al-voice murmurs that this is good for him. Course, Al thought milk was good for you too, when actually it might as well be poison for how disgusting it is.

“Ed,” Roy snaps, dropping his pen and bringing his hands up to massage his temples. “Feel free to go. Anywhere. For as long as you like.”

“Gotta stay until Hawkeye gets back,” Ed points out, then goes back to tapping an automail finger against the window. He’s been doing it for like an hour. _Fuck you, Mustang_ in Morse code ‘til he got tired of it, then on to _I’m so fucking bored_ in a code he learned from Mei, and he was just trying to remember if he’d ever learned any old-school alchemy tapping codes or any Ishbalan ones when Roy started bitching. “She’ll kill us both if I run early.”

“Five more minutes of this,” Roy says, “and I’ll kill _myself_.”

“Some devotion to your country you got, jackass.”

“Why don’t you practice your purification arts? Or read? Or do _anything but that?_ ”

“If I read, I won’t notice if people come in to kill you.”

“Then you could—”

“Tell me what you’re doing.”

Roy freezes like a mouse staring down a snake. Ed loves it when he does that. “Tell you?”

“Yeah, sure. It’ll be boring as fuck, but not as boring as sitting here watching you scribble things and pull your hair out.”

“You’d like me,” Roy says in a worryingly dreamy kind of way, “to share the contents of these top secret documents with you. Because you’re bored.”

“Basically, yeah,” Ed agrees. “Problem?”

Roy’s got a weird, unfocused look now. It’s kinda freaky.

“No,” he says finally, still not actually looking at anything. “No problem. Why would there be a problem?”

Thereupon follows, right, half an hour of the details of the opening deal Roy and Miles are working out with the Ishbalans. Ed already knows all this shit, because he introduced Miles to Mistress Shan and listened to them hammer it out in like twenty minutes. Done and done, right?

Wrong. So wrong. First the nice, clean agreement had to be translated into politicianese until nobody could understand a fuckin’ thing. And only then did Roy get to look at it.

Why anybody’d want this job is a frigging eternal mystery. Everybody should do like Hawkeye’s granddad. He calls himself an advisor, whatever that means. Far as Ed can see, it gets him a nice chair and sweet pay, plus everybody saluting him and calling him sir. In exchange for all that, he periodically wanders over to bitch at Roy. Otherwise doesn’t do dick. Or, if that didn’t appeal, you could do like the general Armstrong, who’s off smashing hell out of dissidents and having a blast.

Roy, meanwhile, gets the nice desk and good pay and saluting, but _he_ has to read all this crap. And field death threats. But he doesn’t get to smash anybody.

He is the clear loser.

Or maybe Ed’s the clear loser, cuz he’s the one standing here twiddling his thumbs and watching Roy’s life suck, isn’t he?

Content of the paperwork’s not less boring than total silence was, but it is fun to know what exactly Roy’s driving himself nuts over. So there’s that. Plus every once in a while Ed can clarify something, since he was there for the original talk and knows what the bullshit language was meant to mean.

Roy’s face when he does that? Yeah, it’s never gonna get old.

This being trapped thing. Ed’s not hating it as much as he ought to. He’s letting himself settle here, letting himself be one of these people. And he knows it’s gonna end in tears and disaster cuz it always fuckin’ does. He is _scared shitless_.

But it’s so easy. They make it easy. They make it really hard for him to cut them loose like he should. The world keeps not going to hell, and it’s annoying. He doesn’t know how to act. For now, he’s trying not to think about it, which is a loser’s tactic. And impossible anyway, what with Al-voice acting all thrilled with developments.

Assholes. If they’d given Ed a proper, death-defying job, he’d be a safe distance away, and besides wouldn’t have time to brood about this shit.

Anyway, half an hour of boring-ass paperwork later, suddenly there’s Hughes. Holy shit, is there _ever_ Hughes—Hughes laughing so hard he can’t talk. He staggers in, slams the door behind him, and leans back against it, weak with the fuckin’ hilarity of it all. He holds up a newspaper so they can see. Front page of the _Central Times_.

It’s a picture of Ed—blurry and far away, but still obviously Ed—and it’s titled ‘The Enigmatic Demon Alchemist—Noble Vigilante or Sinister Government Asassin?’

There is a typo in Ed’s fuckin’ headline. “Mark Rhodes,” he hears himself say distantly, “is a _dead man_.”

“You haven’t even read the article yet,” Hughes gasps out between fits of snickering. “Oh god, the scar! The black magic rituals! Sheep, _sheep!_ ” Then he’s laughing too hard to go on. Thank fuck.

“I’m not wasting my time reading that shit when I could be killing him instead, the—oh, hell, and I’m stuck with _this_ bastard for another hour!”

“Now that Hughes is here,” Roy says, wild-eyed, “I think you may go. Hawkeye won’t hold it against either of us, because Hughes is deadly and paranoid enough even for her.”

“Seriously?” Ed asks. “Cuz if she hunts me down, I’m gonna blame you for everything I ever did wrong in my life.”

Roy scowls, which Ed doesn’t get. Dipshit can’t take a joke.

“Hmm, we wouldn’t want that,” Hughes murmurs, smirking. See? Hughes thinks it’s funny. Course, Hughes thinks everything’s funny.

Roy pulls himself together, good job. “She won’t hunt you down, Elric,” he says. “Go. Be free. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tonight?” Hughes cuts in. “Gracia is making an apple pie. The best apple pie you ever tasted in your life! My perfect Elicia is helping with the crust!”

“I hate apple pie,” Ed lies. He backs away in case Hughes is getting crazy ideas about grabbing his arm or something.

“Winry will be there!”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“Ed,” Roy interrupts, rubbing his forehead. “Just _go_.”

“You’re my favorite, Roy,” Ed announces, darting past Hughes, flinging the door open, and dashing out into the hall.

“Don’t kill anyone within city limits!” Roy shouts after him. Maybe not something the fuhrer should be shouting down the hall, huh?

Ed grins. It’s gonna be a good day. He can tell.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Spin [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038312) by [Opalsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalsong/pseuds/Opalsong)
  * [Spirit's Fall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8435830) by [Batsutousai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batsutousai/pseuds/Batsutousai)




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